Data is a Product

I attended the 1st Big Data Insight Forum this week where organisations like Microsoft, Teradata, EMC Greenplum and Orange explained more about this 'revolution'. The take aways for me were quite simple. It's all about the 3 V's: Volume - the amount of data Variety - the types of data (text, social network updates, address, behaviour, pictures and so on) Velocity - the speed of collection, storage and analysis Simply put, Big Data is not really that new. It's all about analysis of data. The interesting bit is that, thanks to the falling cost of data storage and growth of analytical tools like Hadoop and Splunk, organisations can now get at more of the data that they used to ignore (data exhaust) and make decisions more quickly. The event was very useful in helping me to inform my decisions on how I can build future products (that while I may not describe them as 'Big') will use lots of different types of data and help users make decisions quickly....

Last night, I watched the excellent documentary on BBC 2 about the growth of Facebook and how they use the data created by users to make money. If you didn't catch it, have a look on the iPlayer for Inside Facebook. So, Facebook take your data and use it to do several things. Firstly, they use your friends, links between them and your interests to suggest new friends to you. Very helpful! This often means that you end up with about 200 people in your network who can see what you do or like and vice-versa. That's actually quite helpful and is probably why you joined.. to communicate! Next up, you Like various company pages, band pages and so on. Again, your friends can see this. More importantly, Facebook can see what you Like, who your friends are and the basic details about you. For example, you are Male, live in London, went to school in Cambridge and are currently single. This then allows Facebook to sell you adverts based upon your details. It also allows the compan...