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They say Big Data is going to be big business, big innovation - a big deal. But how is it going to go down? Applied math and decision science company Mu Sigma announced more than $100 million in new venture backing yesterday, including from previous investors Sequoia Capital, bringing the company's total investment to $150 million. Mu Sigma provides big data services to some of the biggest companies in the world.

How do they do it? With a combination of math, science, creative thinking and long hours of hard work. As democratized publishing, network connected devices and the instrumentation of everyday life combine to create a great blue ocean of big data all around us, the latest Mu Sigma funding is a valuable opportunity to get a taste of how one emerging leader in that market combines technology, math and art to engage with this big trend. Not everyone agrees that outsourcing Big Data work like this is the solution, though.

Time is a commodity that when spent, is gone forever. In today's multi-task, multi-function smorgasbord, the flattening of the Internet has opened a window to savvy entrepreneurs looking to utilize and control the time they do have. We aren't talking about magic, but a new breed of workers called virtual assistants.

These assistants take several forms: general assistants, Web developers, SEO specialists, content writers. What they have in common is that they are the specialized, contract workers in an online marketplace. They are the prospective job candidates you've yet to discover.

We've questioned before the value of investing in contact center technology without improving call center conditions, and the ability of outsourced labor (regardless of whether it is also off-shored) to provide good customer service. These are the types of questions that are important for business decision makers to ask. If you want to go a bit further, you can read this story in Mother Jones about the experience of a writer from the U.S. training to work in a center in India. It doesn't provide much detail as to whether you should or shouldn't outsource your customer service functions (or to who), but it doesn't provide an interesting perspective on the conditions of these workplaces.

Is there any truth to the belief that U.S. tech jobs are outsourced to India at least in part because Indian developers are better skilled than U.S. workers? According to GILD, a company that combines professional social networking with games that assess skills, there are some areas in which Indians beat their counterparts in the U.S, but there are others in which Americans excel. GILD examined the results of over 1 million assessments taken by over 500,000 developers with an average of 2-3 years of experience.

Time for a quick geography quiz. Which is closer to Miami: New York or Cartagena, Colombia?

The answer is the latter, as I found out flying down here yesterday. I am attending the Latin American Outsourcing Summit, where leading outsourcing firms in the world pick up new trends and meet with each other along with their major customers, such as Johnson & Johnson, Proctor and Gamble, Microsoft and Miller Beer.

It's a common dilemma for startups: you want to be able to provide excellent customer service and support to your early customers. You want to hear their feedback. You want to address issues folks have quickly and respectfully. You want to fix bugs right away. You want to make customers happy, loyal users.

Often early customer service comes in the form of personal communication from founding team members, particularly when your startup is still small. But as your customer base grows, that sort of very personalized customer service just doesn't scale. It gets harder to answer questions promptly. And key team members have more on their plates that make responding to email inquiries individually challenging.

Business Week published an article recently that talked about changes in outsourcing. They got the cloud part right - massive disruptions and changes in the IT infrastructure stack both in technology and company power positions. But they got the outsourcing part wrong.

There will be big changes for large and middle-tier outsourcing companies. But the large won't necessarily get larger. In fact, the combination of cloud and modern programming frameworks makes it perfect for small developers and medium IT shops to get a leg up on the big consulting firms, putting their models - and margins - at risk.

Wow! It's March already? 2010 is chugging along and as we head into the second week of March its time to look back on the highlights from this week on ReadWriteStart. In this installment of the Weekly Wrapup we talk about how startups make use of crowdsourcing, how outsiders see startup culture, and we even glean some useful lessons from one man and his dancing. And finally we take a look at South by Southwest for startups as the even draws nearer.

last few months, we've focused from time to time on design and how it affects startups. One of the larger issues that comes up that goes hand-in-hand with design is the copywriting that accompanies that design. The importance of carefully crafted wording can not be understated; after all, the words are what actually speaks to your audience when they visit your site. Copywriting is as much an art and a skill as design is, and that's why the crowdsourced design network crowdSPRING is now including copywriting jobs for bids on their site.

Chances are, if you've called customer service to enough companies, you've come across a representative who works for a call-center which has been contracted to handle a comapany's account. Large corporations that don't want to employ their own agents and maintain their own facilities will often outsource customer service to a third party, which at times can mean a company in another part of the world. Bangalore, India was famously portrayed for its role in call-center outsourcing in the Thomas Friedman book The World Is Flat, servicing many large American companies. But tools like outsourcing or crowdsourcing are not always beneficial to every breed of company.