Erick Schonfeld

When you walk through TechShop just outside of Detroit, you see all sorts of contraptions and manufacturing projects—from bipedal robot legs hanging off a wooden stand to super-stretch cargo bikes that can carry big loads. Wind your way past the laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines—past the wood shop and the metal-bending station—and you will find a hallway hung with a half-dozen blackboards from floor to ceiling.

Big Data is a hard concept to grasp because it applies to so many things in our digital world: the exabytes of information produced every year, the digital exhaust of a billion cell phones, the GPS coordinates tracking everything from trucks and trains to the migratory patterns of ocean life, the inventory data spewed by RFID tags, the measurement of our quantified selves through apps and devices that can track every footfall. Rick Smolan, the photographer and mass media coordinator who brought us the Day in the Life books, is embarking on one of his biggest projects yet: The Human Face of Big Data. Smolan sent a hundred photographers around the world to make sense of big data and capture the human side of the equation. In the video above he explains the project and takes a stab at defining big data.

Where most of us see abandoned lots and vacant buildings, Jerry Paffendorf sees a blank canvas. Paffendorf drove me around Detroit when I was there last week for the Techonomy conference. In the video above (shot and edited on my iPad, thank you very much), he takes me on a tour of Detroit, land use, and Chia houses. During this tour, he explains how he thinks the Internet, data, and crowdfunding can help not just reimagine Detroit, but redevelop it.

What draws creative types to Detroit? It's all the possibilities. I got a tour of the city yesterday from Jerry Paffendorf, a local resident and entrepreneur I met on Twitter. Paffendorf is the co-founder of Loveland Technologies, a startup with grand ambitions to help citizens reclaim their neighborhoods and redevelop plots of land. In the video above, he explains why he left New York City and Silicon Valley for Detroit.

When President Obama signed the JOBS Act last April, one of the most controversial and potentially far-reaching provisions was giving startups the ability to raise money through crowdfunding. Private companies would be able to sell shares to all manner of individual investors for the first time. Currently you need to be an "accredited investor" (a high net-worth individual) to buy private company stock through angel rounds or electronic platforms such as SecondMarket and SharesPost. But the JOBS Act will open that up to anybody as soon as the SEC hammers out the rules by early next year.

In the three short years since Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz set up shop as venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, they’ve already established Andreessen Horowitz as one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley, right up there with Accel, Benchmark, Greylock, Kleiner, and Sequoia. Some would argue that it is the top firm. They’ve raised $2.7 billion across three funds and they somehow seem to get into every deal that matters. The Andreessen Horowitz portfolio includes such marquee names as Skype, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Pinterest, Airbnb, Fab, Groupon, and Zynga.