Big Data, Big Opportunity

There is a really great article about data is the new commodity in the same way that we look at oil. One thing the both have in common is that they are out there, it just who is willing to go and dig it up.

Information is quickly piling up all over the place, and I agree with the article that the people who are able to capitalize on this are the ones that will get the big payoff. I especially like the idea of calling these start-ups “wildcats”, that perfectly captures the wild west atmosphere that is going to start happening.

The neat thing is that a lot of this information is out there for free, the real value is how people are going to aggregate those individual data streams into a new and often unexpected products. Take twitter for example (are you following me on twitter?), it is a conduit to what is going on in the hive mind of the internet. This site seems to be gathering up the trends on twitter and then adding news articles about some of the things that are hot.

That is pretty neat: Data is generated in the form of people tweeting about Topic X, as X becomes more “important” (in this case more people discuss it so that it rises above other topics) it gets published to the “trending” list. This website then goes in and looks at that list adds more data to the conversation by reporting news about topic X. That way the separate data points are tied together to show that there is a relationship between them, and in the process makes the data more valuable to the end users (by supplying more context, etc.)

Big data is going to lead to a lot of big opportunities. All we have to do is find the data, combine it in the right way, and perform the right data analysis on it. And unlike bit oil, big data is going to be around a very long time.