I had just completed my morning walk around a scenic reservoir, privileged to stay near one of them. Before reaching the gateof my apartment block, I fetched my mobile to conclude my morning activity on an Android App. It neatly shows my route with places where I slowed down along with the calories burnt, time taken and average pace. It also records all the elevations I had embarked upon during my route. While on lift to the 6th floor my IT mind started racing and pondering on this.
My App,stores all my fitness data; it also allows me to compete with my friends and hence see what they were up to on that particular date. But Hang on, I thought my mobile company probably has far more data than that. This one device I carry with me where ever I go, they have access to all my locations.
They know who I have called and how much time I have spoken to. They must be doing this for every one and hence if all this data is accumulated into one place we will be there for more surprises.
This systems would know who I am connected with and who are my connections connected to If I meet a person later in the day, the system knows that probably we fixed out meeting a here. If this person has called someone else after the phone call and the person is at the same location same time, the system understands that all the three people might be in same meeting.
For instance if a journalist is tracking this and all these three people are CEOs of different companies and that there is an impending cartel being planned; the journalist now can be sure of that. Possibilities are unlimited. If someone tracks and analyzes all videos, voice, mobile data, other sensor data, internet and social media chances are we will need to call this a God system.
The above can be a science fiction now but that we are slowly moving towards this is any body’s guess. On the reality check as of date I would like to throw some information. A study suggested that only 0.5% of 2.8 Zettabytes of data generated so far has been analyzed and most of the data is unstructured and unorganized. By my own estimate about 20% of this datawould be of immediate potential for a large number of businesses or government. So as of now we are at pretty nascent stage.
Finding useful data is like finding a needle in a haystack and once we have those we need to analyze them and can see if any action can be taken on basis of that analysis. When we implemented our first Big Data project, I turned into a believer from being just a critic. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this implementation turned out to be a money making machine for that organization. Never ever I thought that Big Data could be such a great tool in mopping up extra revenue..
For Big Data vendors and Users , those businesses that already have a wealth of data will be the first adopters and beneficiaries. According to me the early adopters would be consumer products, Retail, Insurance, Online sales, Travel and transport, credit card companies and Telecom. All of these are poised to take advantage directly contributing to the revenue.
Just to leave you with a thought here, the number of networked devices had crossed the human population few years ago. Are we in process of creating God?
Author BIO:
Sandeep Lodha is the VP Marketing for Tyrone Systems and is based in Singapore.
