Data is the new-age gold for business innovators

For companies like Facebook and Google, the most valued resource is not the platform, software, or applications. It is the data which people are giving them freely without even realizing the value for it.

If you give a peripheral look at businesses like Uber and Airbnb, do they own the cabs or houses which people are renting on their platform? No, right. Exactly. It’s the data of the people they are utilizing to run their own business. The same goes for food applications, P2P lending applications, or social media platforms.

Come to think of it, in the last decade, technological changes have been massive; innovation has started happening faster, product shelf lives have shortened, sci-fi technology has come to life, and it is turning challenging to keep up with the pace.

Many say that data is the new gold or is more valuable than gold. We beg to differ in both cases; both gold and oil are finite resources. The more and more these natural resources are used, the more we are near to losing them. However, in the case of data, the more it is used, the more sense it makes, and the more it helps businesses to develop new products. Once processed, data is likely to reveal more cases or further applications.

For example, machine learning and artificial intelligence are utilizing the power of data to train chatbots to respond like humans. These technologies were discovered as early as the 1950s but were not able to develop because of the lack of information/data availability. However, with the introduction of the internet, more and more people were leaving their footprints, habits, likings, behaviors online. This information was freely available to the tech-giants to feed to these chatbots to process and learn from and grow.
People believe it is a productive habit to think of how data can be utilized in different manners. There is a myriad of ways with which data can it can be collected, stored, used, and reused.

We have all willing clicked our pictures and uploaded it for the #10YearChallenge and #FaceAppChallenge. We as users were more than willing to upload our pictures and knowingly/unknowingly gave the permission to the Russian App to process our data. In return of images as to how you would look when you are old or how you would in case you wish to change your gender, the company got millions of portrait images which it can utilize to may be develop anti-wrinkle products, innovative spectacles or who knows what!

The process of collecting data has generated value for not only businesses, but it has helped common man also in terms of education, healthcare, reducing hunger crisis as well as fighting climate change. It is said by the year 2030, it is said that the data collection and analysis is going to be the base of all service offerings as well as business models.

Digital innovation has started to alter the ways industries have been functioning, and in the next blog tune in to read how robotics, augmented/virtual reality, IoT, with the help of data are poised to transform businesses across industries.