GigaOM

gigaom.com — NASA officials are planning to monitor all asteroids that pass near Earth, they announced Tuesday, an ambitious effort that will need international collaboration between government organizations, private companies, universities and citizens. The space agency currently spots 95 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than 3,280 feet across.

gigaom.com — This summer some odd-looking pieces of public sculpture will start popping up in pedestrian-heavy parts of New York City. Like a cross between a pogo stick and a helicopter, these contraptions are actually solar-powered charging stations for mobile phones, and they're being installed throughout the city by solar charger maker Goal Zero, design firm Pensa and AT&T.

gigaom.com — It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for the CIO. Every tech vendor on the planet is now officially targeting the Chief Marketing Officer with IT products while also doing everything in its power to make it easy for marketing departments to buy their stuff.

gigaom.com — GE wants to be a big data company. In a presentation in San Francisco, the industrial giant announced a platform of products, including predictive software products, a Hadoop-based big data appliance for ingesting and managing industrial data and a relationship with Amazon Web Services to share industrial data in public clouds.

gigaom.com — There is no shortage of tools to measure and monitor Amazon Web Services usage and spending. Check out Cloudyn, Cloudability, Newvem et al. And then there is also Amazon's own Trusted Advisor. But if you want to use a tool that the biggest of the big AWS customers use, you may want to check out Netflix Ice.