In this era of big data hype, it's easy to understand the hesitation of many organizations to take the plunge. Finding a signal in noisy petabytes of unstructured data isn't easy. Companies like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and Google that "do" big data well have spent hundreds of millions of dollars (or
My previous post pondered whether unlimited data could limit data silos, which was inspired by an extended disruption in the internet service provided by my local cable company. This provided me the opportunity to see just how unlimited the unlimited data plan on my smartphone really was. Ironically, shortly after my
As I scribe these words, GadgetFEST 2014, aka CES, is in full swing. More than 3,000 vendors have descended upon Sin City to to hawk their wares. Nearly 200,000 people are here, and probably thrice as many internet-enabled devices. There seem to be more car-related exhibits than in years past.
Some strong storms recently caused an extended disruption in the internet service provided by my local cable company, which gave me an opportunity to test the reliability of my smartphone's mobile broadband connectivity as well as see just how unlimited my unlimited data plan really is. After successfully passing both aspects of
This is the time of year when we like to make predictions about the upcoming year. Although I am optimistic about the potential of predictive analytics in the era of big data, I am also realistic about the nature of predictability regardless of how much data is used. For example, in
The "Internet of Things" is the latest buzzword characterizing the machine-generated big data that has outstripped our ability to derive value from it. Think of UPS delivering 16 million packages every day through various hubs and all the logistics and decisioning that goes into that. But how does an organization
My new favorite game is quite addictive, simple and, believe it or not, free. I call it "Stumped by Google Autocomplete." Here's how it works: type any word or phrase into Google, and see what Google suggests with it's Autocomplete function. Like all things Google, this feature learns from searches
Fifteen years ago, updating a website required knowledge of HTML. Now, many content management systems like WordPress, Tumblr and Joomla merely require knowledge of WYSIWYG tools like Microsoft Word. So, will the same thing happen with big data? I hesitate to say that everyone will need to learn data-related skills. I
“Our corporate data is growing at a rate of 27% each year and we expect that to increase. It’s just getting too expensive to extend and maintain our data warehouse.” “Don’t talk to us about our ‘big’ data. We’re having enough trouble getting our ‘small’ data processed and analyzed in
The data quality and data governance community has a somewhat disconcerting habit to want to append the word “quality” to every phrase that has the word “data” in it. So it is no surprise that the growing use of the phrase “big data” has been duly followed by claims of
