Interesting Snippets

The seventy-year history of the computer era to date can be seen as the Gold Rush phase of data. That is, the (comparatively) small amounts of data captured and stored – sales figures, payroll, scientific results, etc. — has been of high value, easy to capture, and increasingly accessible…

(But) those deposits of high rich data ‘ore’ are becoming increasingly difficult to find… overwhelmed by a giant wave of new, much lower-grade data streaming by the terabytes from everything from tablets and smartphones to billions of autonomous sensor measuring everything from weather to human digestive tracts…

(And so in goldrush analogy) the tools that have been successful to this point, the picks and screens we’ve been using just won’t cut it anymore… We are now out of the gold-panning business; the world of Big Data involves dynamite, water cannons, steam shovels and mega-dump trucks.