by Angela Guess
Eric Savitz recently argued that Big Data is the only business model that tech has left: ” Remember sitting through your college physics classes wondering when you’d ever need to apply what you were learning?” he writes.”That time has now come. In spades. In physics, the second law of thermodynamics states that all systems seek to evolve so as to either minimize their energy or maximize their disorder (AKA entropy). From a state of zero entropy at the Big Bang, our universe has been expanding toward a state of maximum entropy for roughly the past 14 billion years. And today, in my day-to-day life as a venture capitalist investing in software companies, every start-up I see is directly related to the second law of thermodynamics.”
Savitz continues, “With hardware, networks and software having been commoditized to the point that all are essentially free, it was inevitable that the trajectory toward maximum entropy would bring us to the current age of Big Data. Because the ‘manufacturing cost’ – i.e., the cost of the underlying hardware, software and networks required to produce and transport data – continues to approach an effective cost of zero, it comes as no surprise that the volume of data now being produced continues to skyrocket, with something on the order of 2.7 Zettabytes (2.7 x 1021) of information to be produced in 2012.”
