Data is the natural resource. Media specialists and researchers alike are addressing the information collected by linked data devices as more significant to this day and age than oil was to the 1900s. This linkage of data has the aptitude to run all economies worldwide. By providing us hypothetically infinite information about ourselves, communities, and domain, data mining promises to revolutionize the way we operate daily. Raw data by itself isn’t anything but a meaningless assembly of statistics, facts, and expressions. To those consumers and firms lacking the proficiency to deduce said data, this can become a cause of apprehension, as they strain to meet the latest modifications in the global economy. Unlike most natural resources, data is not limited. Data, in fact, grows exponentially. This is illustrated by Moore’s Law which states “the number of transistors per square inch on an integrated chip doubles every 18 months.” In fact over the next two years, Cisco, a network solutions provider, calculates that 25 billion devices will have internet capability. By 2020, this number will surpass 50 billion, which exceeds the global population by six. Which is the equivalent of more than 4GB of data transportation from each interrelated person daily. Given the astounding girth of this new resource hailed as ‘Big Data’ it is conceivably not startling that the dispute on how to address it has commonly focused on technical concerns. How to accumulate and stockpile the data is a colossal undertaking in itself. This to analyzing and computing that information has commanded other enormous leaps and bounds onward in server technology to sanction people to stock, interlock, and start examining compound data groups, otherwise identified as ‘data mining’. But the main financial gains will not come simply from technical resolutions. Furthermore, the secret to making money from these lines of data is understanding the intuitions within the chaos and white noise by stirring from the mining of data to the meaning of data. Firms that manage to convert complex data into clear-cut services that people understand which in turn can improve their interactions, wellbeing, happiness, and relationship to the world. This will generate resilient connections and continuing relations to their customers. These fresh intentions can take numerous forms. They can be associated tangible devices such as vehicles and home appliances, or digital resolutions like social podiums online, and additionally intricate ecosystems containing both these tangible and digital elements. Nonetheless they will all be continuously changing. Similarly just as people adjust and acclimate, so the import of the data they manufacture shifts periodically. Correspondingly firms wanting to be part of this data upheaval must move from building their old way productions, and assume an origination and assertion method to data focused intentions. The greater the digital element in the related proposal, the greater the capacity to acclimate the proposal while being used by the end consumer. Proposing these intricate proposals requires a resourceful and imaginative mindset. Firms need to discard their shielding silos and exposed themselves to a multidisciplinary method of functioning. Revolutionizing with a wide range of experts from researchers and economists to those scholars and psychologists, as well as other firms will upturn their odds of victory. Through co-creating, they will discover fresh approaches to the most convincing applications, which will progress gradually under the supervision of those that bring them excitement, as well as those that utilize them.
This data domain is still very much in the early stages. The discussion concerning precisely what this is, where this is going, and how every Tom, Dick, and Harry will get there has just originated. It is non-disputable that companies of all sizes and across every industry will need to reconsider their place within this data domain. This domain is a world that is much more rapid and intelligent, where the division line among the tangible and digital, and the business firm and the consumer, are fuzzy, and in which all people and all things are a part of the conundrum. With this an innovative domain comes a whole new set of rules. Whichever individual or firm desiring to revolutionize inside it needs to appreciate these features of Big Data, how it is examined, and how it concerns society and business firms in order to transform to the best of their facilities. Not taking these things into consideration they risk generating meaningless services, and within the worst case scenario, isolating and losing customers or associates. But where does it come from?
Big Data comes from any associated digital device and its boundaries, like webpages, feelers, apps, and arguments to purchase in retail. Yet, the driving force backing this new sensation has derived from mobile devices which accumulate data on the go and direct it online. This form of data can be anything from the unambiguous text that people enter directly, such as, status updates on social networks, online search engines, picture uploads, or blogs, to imbedded files, composed indirectly when people start up their mobile phones. Both categories of data can be examined independently, jointly, or in a combination approach with different data arrangements to generate original meaning. And where does it go to?
Obviously, the information doesn’t mysteriously change itself into significant data. Primarily, it has to be composed then construed by individuals, ‘data miners’ if you will. Today, individuals are one or the other professional data researchers and computer operators, or fanatics that work collectively on social podiums to manufacture encryption to mechanize the data processing. Regularly, these individuals have day jobs, and elect to spend their nights playing with data groups to discover new understandings from data that they come across in open source podiums on the web. In order to make involvement and association as laid-back as possible, they use regulated data formats like RSS, HTML, as well as RDF. Then by utilizing the Semantic Web to disclose their findings with the global world and find connections within data sets. This Semantic Web is a combined undertaking that permits additional data to be public online in file formats that can be edited by others. While utilizing these guidelines within the Semantic Web, these communal formats also allow programs to find and interpret data. Therein this aids to facilitate technologies to recognize and reply to multifaceted human applications focusing on their definitions. For example, the IBM CPU Watson, that beat human players at Jeopardy. Now what does this mean for firms?
Big Data has the ability to transform firms. This can be used in advertising, retailing, operations, and commercial management across the board. One of its more common applications is in generating well-organized forms of prevailing business firms. Merchants using the Web, for instance, utilize big data in order to track and gather Intel on customers. They can monitor customer purchases and complete surveys, then apply the information to make future decisions about inventory or website improvements, or provide customers with ‘intelligent’ recommendations on what to buy, based on their behavior in the e-commerce environment. To start adapting, companies looking to tackle Big Data need to bear its key characteristics in mind, say market research company Forrester Research. These can be distilled down to the four Vs: Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Variability. In short, this means that businesses need to be able to handle huge amounts of complex and differing data sets in ways that help them make the best possible decisions (either for themselves or for their customers) incredibly quickly. This flow of information, from raw data through to meaningful solutions, is often referred to in the data world as DIKE, or Data, to Information, to Knowledge, to Expertise. Put another way, any propositions that use Big Data need to be, for all intents and purposes, made up of virtuous circles of information. They need to capture and make sense of the flow of information around a system extremely rapidly. Data is no longer passive information but an active, ethereal material that is woven into consumer and business propositions. Data from people’s actions is sensed, interpreted and responded to in real time, in personal and meaningful ways. Big Data can also be used to create entirely new business models. Two companies that have put this to good use are cell phone company Vodafone and the SatNav firm TomTom. Their joint project, TrafficHD, uses data from network antennas and their connections to Vodafone handsets to allow TomTom to gather real-time information about the flow of cars on the roads, then feed that back to its entire network. Crucially in the data world, ‘data in’ does not equal ‘data out’. In the case of TrafficHD, the information gathered by the phone is used to inform other loops of information that are continuously updated and aggregated with others, to inform and improve the overall service for thousands of users. Furthermore, what does it mean for people?
For the people who use data-driven products and services, the benefits are almost limitless. The way in which vast quantities of information can be distilled into meaningful innovations can range from helping an individual carry out a seemingly simple task, to insights that can radically improve the health and well-being of societies? One meaningful way to use data is in the automation of simple tasks. For example Nest is an automated thermostat that learns from your behavior and how your house is effectively heated. It uses data from a range of sources including a motion sensor, a temperature sensor, and a humidity sensor and via its wi-fi connection, online weather data, in order to program itself with the aim of saving on heating and cooling bills. Data can also be used to customize and personalize propositions, a good example here is the portfolio of products that can be personalized by 3D printing firm Shapeways. With simple design tools and automated algorithms it enables users to create custom 3D-printable hardware. There is still a high ‘gadget/fashion’ factor to this at the moment, but it is easy to imagine the wealth of opportunities that emerge from the advancements of 3D printing capabilities. In the field of health and wellbeing, Big Data is already allowing patients to collaborate with one another. Using innovations like Patientslikeme, which encourages openness and the sharing of experiences, people can compare specific insights about their genetic predisposition, history, and lifestyle to help patient groups to learn from each other and improve their overall wellbeing. Beyond the individual, data can be used to meaningfully inform an organization. The WeatherActive system, for example, is used by some hospitals for decision support during extreme weather events like hurricanes.
One of the defining characteristics of the data world is openness and transparency. Before the days of the internet, companies and individuals fiercely protected their business data and personal information. Sharing data with anyone else was akin to losing their competitive advantage. Today, although companies often still closely guard their most recent and precious data sets, many are willing to share a lot of their data. This brings two potential benefits; the opportunity to improve business through others, and for it to be applied for social interests. For example companies are increasingly partnering up to tackle environmental issues like deforestation and climate change, such as the Planetary Skin Institute. This non-profit collaboration between NASA and Cisco uses data from millions of satellite, airborne, sea- and land-based sensors to analyze changing environmental conditions around the world. Besides, companies increasingly understand that by sharing parts of their data-sets they enable others to innovate and therefore extend their propositions. For example, Google Maps open APIs allow developers to superimpose data and interfaces on Google Maps. Alongside private companies, data is also being made more accessible through government-funded open data initiatives, and coder-friendly open APIs, which allow third-party programmers to add new behaviors to existing systems. Users are becoming more open and transparent too. Social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn let people share data in ways akin to real-world social interactions. With the increasing uptake of smartphones, consumers can use these platforms even more dynamically to update their activities and search for new information on the move. For example, a comment from a person about his local weather or traffic is not really interesting to anyone but that person. But a comment that is geo-tagged using GPS through a smartphone suddenly becomes interesting to anyone in his or her area. In the non-profit world, websites like Ushahidi16 are helping people in Kenya to find other like-minded social activists by enabling users to upload, store, and compare information about important local events. The site, whose name means ‘witness’ in Swahili, started in the aftermath of Kenya’s 2007 presidential election to collect eyewitness reports of violence and add them to a Google map.
In the Transformation economy, the value that companies bring comes from being part of a public-private network or community whose aim is to improve people’s lives in a sustainable way, either on a global or local scale. We believe that the solutions to the big issues facing our global society cannot be found by one single player. Instead, industries, governments, academia, and grass roots movements will have to collaborate to create local solutions that then contribute to the larger whole. With the advent of Web 3.0, many of the networks that can help bring about the transformation economy are driven by Big Data. We have already seen how the Planetary Skin Institute tracks changing environmental conditions around the world. But it also collaborates with research and development partners across multiple sectors both locally and globally to develop scalable solutions to address resource scarcity. The Institute is currently exploring a variety of such projects, including improvements in the resilience of low-income communities, early warning systems for natural disasters, and systems to support food security and agricultural risk using remote sensing and geospatial data mining. On a smaller scale, an outfit in Chile is helping farmers to plan their work thanks to cell phone updates. The Mobile Information Project (MIP) uses software to create news feeds that give them targeted agricultural information from the internet. One farmer reported that his entire year’s crop was saved by an SMS that advised him to delay planting because of impending bad weather. The next week brought a heavy storm that would have washed his seedlings away. By being data-driven, these propositions continuously adapt to the user and their changing context to ensure that the information they provide is up to date and meaningful. The bigger the connected digital component of the proposition, the bigger the meaning that can be derived from it, and ultimately, the bigger the number of people whose lives can be improved by it. For the moment, organizations like the Planetary Skin Institute and MIP are the exception, not the rule. While society may be moving slowly toward a new era, many companies find they have trouble letting go of old practices and mindsets. To help businesses, organizations, and even individuals innovate for the transformative economy, Philips Design believes that the two strategies we are currently exploring can help. By bringing groups from a wide variety of specialties and backgrounds together we will be part of the new data-driven world. It is a world in which digital innovations bring people closer together, to make sense of the chaos and bring real meaning to all of our lives.