Ah yes, "the power of a society based on 10 times as much data". The best examples that the authors could come up with are:

* A professor receiving an automatic notification about when his flight was delayed. This saved him approximately 2 minutes as compared to checking the flight number before he left for the airport.

* Stephen Wolfram figuring out what time he likes to send emails.

Big data proponents need to tell a better story about how data will empower the individual. So far it seems like it's just about large corporations engaging in cross-merchandising, advertisers getting you to click on things, and spy agencies building dossiers without all that pesky legwork.