What I think is not important. It's what YOU think; it's how YOU apply these applications; it's where YOU see them having an impact and being effective.

As for the use of these applications in trade marketing, before wholesalers give over warehouse space to untried goods, surely they need to know there's an in-store demand to underpin their investment of space for the proposed goods in the first place?

(Also, Amazon's Mechanical Turk). I fear this may fuel a "race to the bottom" - paying people a miniscule amount to do a task. In some parts of the world, the amount of payment may be of significant portion of their income, but elsewhere it's forcing people to work for less and have the value of their work minimized.

If it is the technological approach to analyzing human behavior you won't get much in the way of really useful information. That is not because of the technology, but because of the way the data is collected. In my work most problems begin with flawed analyses - and escalate madly once the technology is brought in.

There is still room for good ol' human imagination. Because true innovation lies outside the realms of technology. After all, technology doesn't do things by itself, it does something because someone has asked it to. Data doesn't drive itself, someone has watched something do something and recorded it, or set a machine to record it.

One way to discover real innovation comes not from what people do, it is understanding what they don't do, and why they don't do it.