IoT, Social Media and their Monster Child called Big Data, What is next?
It is extremely fascinating how we can do almost anything these days without moving too many body parts–heck, without even moving too many fingers. And, it might even be misleading in the article title to say that Big Data is the child of social media and the IoTs (Internet of Things), since the Internet was basically conceived back in the late 80s and started generating quantifiable data by the late 90s.
The rapid change that occurred in the past 5 to 10 years in both the IT and digital media industry is considered one of, if not the, reason behind the explosion of data that the world is seeing today. The numbers that are generated from our daily usage of digital devices, interacting on social media, and even generally surfing the world wide web, are mind boggling.
The articles, “Big Data: Are you ready to blast-off?” and “How Much Data is Out There?“, discuss the amount of data that was produced in 2012 and provide readers with an estimation of how much data we are expected to produce by 2020. The numbers are astronomical in every sense. According to IBM, the “connected” world produced close to 2.5 exabytes–almost 2.5 billion gigabytes–of data every day in 2012. This adds up to a staggering 2.8 zettabytes, which is almost 2.8 trillion gigabytes, for the whole year. To put this into perspective, 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data are enough to fill almost 58 billion 32GB of iPads, which is 9.6x the earth’s population!!! And, this is no where near what we are expected to see by 2020, where the world is projected to produce 40 zettabytes of data! Cra-zy.
It is important to note that social media has a huge impact on the amount of data that is being produced daily. DOMO inc. created an infographic that outlines just how much data is being shared on social media outlets in one minute of a day. You can check out the infographic for all of the stats, but here are a few:
- Facebook users share 2,460,000 million content updates
- WhatsApp users share 347,222 thousands photos
- Twitter users tweet 277,000 thousand times
- Apple users download 48,000 thousand apps
And the list goes on.
It is without a doubt that current technologies have changed the way we go about many things. With so many emerging industries taking advantage of this era’s digital stamp–digital wearables, autonomous cars and most consumer products–it is no brainer that the data being produced can have a huge impact on our lives. But, analyzing all of this data takes a lot of time, resources and computing power; it is estimated that 70% of the data being produced now is unstructured, which means it isn’t filtered or organized properly enough to be analyzed and studied, which is currently the most important issue related to big data.
What is next?
There is a lot of talk about how collected data can be used, and what will it be used for. This raw data is a goldmine, IF-and-only-IF, it is analyzed and filtered to produce effective, qualitative and quantitative data that can return profit. Bain & Company have outlined how companies that have opted to adjust their strategic structure in order to be able to analyze big data early on are out-performing their competitors by a wide margin.
Big data and the IoT can enhance many areas of our lives now and in the near future. In my humble opinion, the two areas that can benefit the most from them are:
1- Smart Governments
Discussing government brings out mixed emotions, from anger to annoyance to sympathy to uncertainty! Today’s governments are still following old bureaucratic ways to achieve their goals and serve the public, from simple services like issuing personal identifications and updating addresses, to major events such as elections. Governments have not fully embraced the digital era that we are living in and, although many governments are now taking steps to bring public services up to speed with the 21st century motto of digitization, these steps are so slow that it seems the world outside of any government building is moving 10x faster than inside.
Although big data main advantage is considered to be the essential base for predicting patterns and future behaviors, it is worth noting that governments are probably among the top institutions in any country to have access to tons of data, although this data seems to be little used. And, unlike the problem that other industries are facing in dealing with raw data, governments have access to well-structured data–just think of how SIN and drivers license numbers are connected to virtually everything else, from bank accounts and phone numbers to mortgages and cars ownership. However, in order for governments to build and sustain smart digitally capable services, they must go through some major overhauls of (and possibly fights with unions that protect the jobs of) public service employees, since these jobs might be the first to be cut or eliminated in such a case.
However, if governments are looking to stream services across the board in order to help ease public lives, major decisions will have to be made to incorporate changes to a lot of services that will include initiatives that allow them to use data in real time. A very good example would be the simple process of instantaneously changing a driver’s licenses address in every location that the driver license was used. The real time interaction with information is the true essence of what a smart government should look like.
2- The Service Industry
The general service industry, and probably consumer services in particular, might be the biggest gainers of the IoT — Social Media — Big Data integration.
Consumers today are not just interacting with services and service providers through online and personal communications; on the contrary, the availability of social media outlets–like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp and other apps allow consumers to give detailed feedback about a product or a service, and unlike the good old days where feedback is one-on-one, nowadays feedback will be available to the world literally in the blink of an eye. These ways of interactivity have opened the doors to unlimited possibilities of B2C relationships.
And, if all of these outlets are not enough, there is the IoT, which is according to “Gartner’s 2014 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies,” is sitting at the top of the hype curve as of 2014, which is strong proof that the IoT consists of the most talked about and most sought after technologies that companies are interested in now.
The core idea of the IoT–sensors connected to the Internet–is bringing forth a multitude of ideas more than before, the biggest of these ideas being smart homes and wearable technologies. Furthermore, businesses have unprecedented access to data about their customers, e.g., statistical and behavioral data in the form of click counts, time spent browsing online, tweets about products, photo sharing, Facebook posts or comments, etc., which are helping businesses understand their customers better so that they can deliver more personalized products to customers.
With the amount of data anticipated to be produced by 2020, and the amount of “connected-things” expected to be around by 2020–estimated to be 50 billion things, according to CISCO–it is not a surprise that companies are pressured to invest heavily in analytical power today, in order to be able to process all of that data and deliver more tailored customer experiences.
Lastly, it is essential to understand that, although these technologies are helping our lives become more autonomous, and while no one today (including myself) can imagine life would be without our beloved connected devices, gearing toward full autonomy and digitization can have some negative impacts on our daily and personal lives, personal privacy and security being just one such impact.
