Our Planet is Growing a Nervous System
My ten year old son recently heard me speaking on the phone about this project and asked me what Big Data is. I thought for a minute and then said, “Imagine if the whole human race had been looking through one eye for all of our existence and, all of a sudden, scientists gave us the ability to open up a second eye. You’re not just getting more information, more data; you’re literally getting a whole new dimension. You’re getting depth and perspective, 3D vision. That’s what Big Data is, not simply more information but a new way to see or extract meaning from a sea of information. Simply put, Big Data is giving us a brand new way to see things.
The Value in Unstructured Data
Big Data is the biggest trend in IT right now, however the term is loosely thrown around and becoming increasingly ambiguous. Everyone seems to be doing some sort of “Big Data” nowadays, which can cause great confusion among organizations with actual Big Data needs. We at IKANOW focus on unstructured data analytics, and may be a little bias, but believe it is an essential part of any Big Data offering. One question we hear all the time is “what’s the business value in unstructured data?” Occasionally, we also receive raised eyebrows and blank stares when referring to unstructured data. To help answer this question and provide clarity about unstructured data, let’s take a look at the differences between structured and unstructured, and how it all relates to Big Data and the business value.
Getting Creative with Big Data and Google Apps
Big data isn’t just for those who can wrangle Hadoop or wrestle with R. Service interfaces (APIs) make it easy for even the relative novice explorer some creative solutions. Working for an innovation centre I often find the need to quickly glue together service APIs to gain some insight from the data flowing around our sector. More often than not I turn to Google Sheets (Spreadsheets) and Google Apps Script to rapidly develop dashboards I can share with colleagues. It’s reassuring to see I’m not the only one who uses this approach.
#bdw13 Big Data Week Announce dates for April 2013
Big Data Week is pleased to announce new dates for the 2013 week long festival. We’ll be kicking off on the 22nd April 2013 and running until the 28th April with a mixture of meetups, network events, hackathons and other fun data stuff. This year Big Data Week has partnered with media140 Worldwide, the hugely successful digital and social media community platform, to produce and co-ordinate the weeklong series of activities and events.