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There may be no place else to put all this "big data" except the cloud, if the sheer breadth of data continues to expand at the current rate. The demand for storage outside the data center may soon eclipse demand for storage inside it, if the latest four-year forecast by analyst firm IDC proves accurate.

In a report released this morning by IDC's vice president for storage systems, Richard Villars, the firm calculates that enterprises worldwide spent $3.3 billion for public cloud-based storage in 2010.

In its annual mobile technology report, Forrester Research has outlined the trends it expects to see in the coming year. Technologies like 4G and LTE, Near Field Communication (NFC), barcodes and augmented reality will see increasing amounts of hype in 2011, and the use of mobile/social/location combinations will soar, the report says. But for companies, the goal should now be on developing mobile business cases and strategies, and not jumping on the bandwagons surrounding these types of disruptions.

These technologies - LTE, NFC and mobile AR - will take years to emerge, says Forrester. Strategy needs to come before technology.

The analysts at Gartner must have been fairly impressed with the Apple iPad because their latest research report predicts that over 50% of the computers purchased for children will have touchscreens by 2015. In this case, Gartner defines children as those under the age of 15 or, as we like to call them, "Generation I." (This is the new, hipper terminology for children of the 2000's once dubbed "Generation Z" or "digital natives.") They're the ones born into a world where computers and cellphones are introduced as baby toys, where the iPod has always existed and where everyone they know can be found on Facebook. And now, it seems, they're going to grow up with computers in an entirely different way, too.

Earlier this week, Juniper Research published a report which said the market for location-based services (think mobile check-in games like Foursquare, social networks like Loopt, location-enabled apps like Google Maps, etc.) will bring in revenues of more than $12.7 billion by 2014. Spurring this growth are a number of factors, including the increased number of App Stores, handset improvements, access to high-speed mobile Internet and improvements to positioning technology.

While it's clear that location-based services are on the move, pinpointing a dollar amount to their market is a trickier subject. Has Juniper overestimated? U.K.-based consultancy Broadsight thinks so. "These numbers are way overstated," says firm co-founder Alan Patrick, who concludes that's it's far too early to tell the market's true size at this time.

One exabyte is a billion gigabytes. It's one quintillion bytes. And yes, "quintillion" is a number so large, it almost seems made-up. But that's how much online video will be consumed by 2017, according to new reports from U.K.-based research firm Coda. Actually, to be precise, they're claiming that mobile broadband users accessing the net via laptops and netbooks will consume 1.8 exabytes of video. Per month.