Smart mobile devices, cloud and growing Internet connectivity create significant increases in the volume of data. Quantification, enabled by enormous sources of new data, will march through academia, business and government: Welcome to the Era of Big Data.
Data, all the time, grows at least 50% a year, or more than doubling every two years. Now, all over the world, innumerable digital sensors in automobiles, retail packaging, electrical meters, shipping containers, and even in our bridges measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, or any other change in the air.
There was, for example, at CeBIT, the Koubachi Wi-fi Plant Sensor from Switzerland that measures what matters most to your plant: soil moisture, temperature and light—via Wi-Fi. Free Cloud Service
They even offer Koubachi Plant Care Engine, a free cloud service that diagnoses your plant’s vitality based on their science-based plant care models and sends care instructions and alarms to your iPhone or by e-mail.
Link these talkative sensors (and they will soon talk as well as SMS or write to you) to cloud intelligence and you see the rise of the Internet of Things-- and that is also fuels the trend to Big Data.
And it’s not only the growing volume of data that makes the new Zettabyte Era so “Big.” It’s also the complexity, diversity and velocity of delivery that adds to the “big” challenge.
We will need to collect the Big Data, analyze it, and present it in near-real time-- so decisions can be made on the productivity, profitability or efficiency of an organization. And to understand what’s really happening and make accurate predictions.
Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook are already masters at harnessing the data of the Web — and make no mistake Big Data will become a new class of economic asset, like gold bullion or a government credit line.
Companies and organizations that have Big Data under control will rule over their competitors: they will be empowered.
The predictive power of Big Data will dominate in business but will also show up in fields like public health, economic development and government and NGO forecasting. For example, researchers tracking Google search requests found an upswing in search requests like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” and were able to predict weeks-ahead an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms (whereas emergency room typically report visits only a weeks or two later...)
At the forefront of Big Data technology are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence, natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning: all software-driven (and present in the software and R&D themed halls at CeBIT 2012.
With Big Data, of course, comes big security issues as hackers and other malefactors are drawn to Big Data like college students are to rock concerts. “Why do I rob banks?” said a famous bank robber. “...Because that’s where all the money is.”
