by Angela Guess
The New York Times has asked the question: Is Big Data a bubble? The article answers, “In case you’re in a hurry: Of course it is. And that is good.” It continues, “Longer version: Last week there were several events that convinced me that one of the great tech bubbles inflating right now is around what people have agreed to call ‘Big Data.’ Basically the term reflects the fact that it’s now so easy to digitize and put on the Internet all kinds of information — things as diverse as the measurements of passive sensors, most or all the world’s books, 200 million tweets a day and most of the world’s significant financial transactions — that the data is growing enormously.”
It adds, “Big Data is really about, however, the benefits we will gain by cleverly sifting through it to find and exploit new patterns and relationships. You see it now in things like Facebook ads, which are put in front of you because the posts you have read and contributed to (which Facebook’s algorithms get to examine as the price of this ‘free’ service) indicate you might be ready to buy the advertised good.”
The article goes on, “Alex Rampell, the chief executive of TrialPay, made a case that credit card companies should not charge their 2 percent fees on a transaction, since ‘the value of the transaction isn’t in the fees, it’s in the data that is generated.’ When you know what someone has purchased, you can make a case of what ad to put in front of them next… Mr. Rampell may be right, but there was no proof in his admittedly brief talk that this is actually true. Is it really easier and better to move a 2 percent business, with relatively fixed costs of technology and insurance, over to a much more variable ad-based business?”
photo credit: sovietmole
