by Angela Guess
A new article takes a look at the current “tech bubble” and how Big Data fits in: “Bloomberg Businessweek worries that a new bubble is forming in Silicon Valley, and that this one will be different and worse than the ones that came before. The argument presented by author Ashlee Vance is that while previous tech industry bubbles, like the one that burst in the spring of 2000 and turned dot-com into dot-bomb, left behind important innovations, this one won’t. This one – let’s call it Bubble 2.0 – consists mainly of companies using the Net to market, sell, and advertise, and the only innovations they’re coming up with are better ways to get us to click and/or buy. As former Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher says, ‘The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.’”
The article continues, “the core of Bubble 2.0 is a set of companies, technologies, and specialists that ‘poke around in data, hunt for trends, and figure out formulas that will put the right ad in front of the right person.’ Of course, the first two of these activities have been going on as long as there have been geeks (which is to say, as long as there have been people). So what’s new now? The amount of data available, and the power of the digital tools — databases, memory, processors — available (at ever-lower price points) to poke around in it and hunt for trends. Today’s environment is one of ‘big data.’ And it’s an absolute playground for statisticians, algorithmicists, and other applied math whizzes. These folk get to flex their mental muscles, identify patterns, make predictions, test hypotheses, and so on in ways that were just not possible when digital data were more scarce and computers had less horsepower. As a result, their skills are now highly valued, and they’re commanding lots of attention, good jobs, and high salaries.”
