As the New York Times claimed last weekend, 2012 is truly turning out to be the year big-data crossed over from being a topic of interest to tech gurus, IT managers, and geeks, to being a concept understood and embraced by the public domain.
You'd expect a site like Internet Evolution to be hashing out the good and bad news about big-data in the context of business intelligence and predictive analytics, but when it starts showing up in headlines, and even comic strips, it's surely time for its close-up:
The New York Times has adopted the term in headlines like 'The Age of Big Data' and 'Big Data on Campus.' And a sure sign that Big Data has arrived came just last month, when it became grist for satire in the 'Dilbert' comic strip by Scott Adams. 'It comes from everywhere. It knows all,' one frame reads, and the next concludes that 'its name is Big Data.'
We may even be looking at a coming wave of big-data jokes:
When I asked my friend, Gartner VP Merv Adrian, what a Data Scientist was, he answered: 'a Data Scientist is a Data Analyst who lives in San Francisco.'
This might all mean that everyone is getting familiar with the concept of large, unstructured data sets, and their importance in the enterprise and in public life. Or it might just confirm that we're comfortable with mocking what we don't really understand.
According to the Times report, even some specialists have expressed skepticism about the value and scope of the term itself. Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, calls it "vague, but... getting at something real." Jim Davis, CMO at SAS, "scoffed at it initially," before jumping "on the bandwagon." Elsewhere, tech journalist Michael Miller has condemned it as a mere buzzword.
This is understandable. I'm the first to argue that there's nothing new about analytics as such. Ask Aristotle. Data-sets have been steadily growing for years -- and truly gigantic sets, like the 15 petabytes produced annually by the Large Hadron Collider are irrelevant to business purposes, let alone everyday life.
Others will argue, however -- and I'm increasingly convinced they're right -- that it's not just the scale of data, but it's velocity and variety, which are game changers. The Library of Congress is a large data set, if you like, but it's not being supplemented at blinding speed in real-time, unlike, for example, the genomic databases discussed by NextBio's Satnam Alag, our guest on last month's Smarter Analytics Clan radio show.
This month -- this coming Thursday, in fact, I'll be talking with Gil Elbaz, co-creator of Oingo Adsense (later purchased by Google), founder and CEO of Factual, and just the person to ask about big-data's soaring profile.
Just how many terabytes of data is he storing on Factual's databases, and how? What tools does he use to analyze it? Above all, what's its velocity? And are we truly getting to grips with big-data, or just laughing nervously about something which can seem too big to handle?
Thanks for the explanation. If previous database and data warehouse analytics could not provide the needed insight what tools are used to derive value from BD?
I agree. Big Data is big. Big Data is huge, so huge in fact, as noted, a hyphen was added, implying Big-Data is modifying something.
That something seems elusive. Big Data is a great concept, but it may be too big to get a handle on.
I ordered a book, "The Ethics of Big Data," that was supposed to be released in the first quarter of 2012 and I continue to get emails from Amazon that its release date has been pushed back, now into the fall. Perhaps the authors are having trouble actually defining Big Data.
I did my part. I teach a marketing class in an MBA program and I got all my students frothed up earlier this year that Big Data was the next big thing. I'm sure many of them wowed potential employers in interviews just by saying the words big and data in the same sentence.
But like everyone, I think, I'm trying to make something real out of it and other than the concept, I'm coming up with little data.
First ... on "The Year of Big-Data" (and where did the hyphen come from?) ... yes, this is the year of BD, in the sense that it is the catchword that everyone is marketing around this year (virtual, cloud, Big-Data, ... what comes next). But it takes years for thechnologies/technical strategies to really become mainstream and routinely valuable. We are a long way off from that point.
On "What is Big-Data" ... that's a much debated question, to which my answer (at present) is "The interaction of technologies and data characterized by volume and complexity to provide analytical insights not previously available through database and data warehouse analytics". ANd if anyone wants to say that's fuzzy, and that ther eis a lot of overlap ... I agree. BD is probabaly one of those things that you know when you see it ...
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Hospitality is one industrial sector making big strides in deploying analytics to enhance customer experience. We heard about it last week on IE Radio, in discussion with Todd Davis of Choice Hotels. I recently learned from IHG's Director of Revenue Optimization, Dev Koushik, about how analytics can be used to set optimal room prices across 700,000 rooms in nearly 5,000 properties.
The big announcement at the opening keynotes of IBM's 2013 Smarter Commerce Global Summit is that IBM is putting Watson into companies, and companies are putting Watson to work.
A study of US ecommerce trends in the run up to Mother's Day points to what Jay Henderson, Global Strategy Director for IBM Smarter Commerce, called "a pretty seismic shift" in online shopping habits.
The New York Times made a fuss about the obvious this week, as it so often does, pointing out that Hollywood increasingly leverages big-data to select and hone movie scripts.
State and local government agencies would love to get their hands around big-data. All they lack is adequate data storage and computer power, and enough staff.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling of customer behavior to convert more site visitors into leads, says Brian Baron, director of business analytics, in an interview at the Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Elizabeth Pizzinato, SVP of marketing and communications at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, calls content marketing "the new black" and explains how her brand engages its target audience.
Linda Descano, President and CEO of Women & Co., and managing director of partnerships and branded content of North America marketing at Citi, explains her firm's marketing opportunities and challenges.
Gil Elbaz, CEO of Factual, talks about the importance of data and analytics for marketers and how the technology is evolving to better assist automated, real-time decisions.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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