The Economist this week is very choice. If you have the means, I suggest you pick it up. There’s a whole special report on data, why they’re interesting, and how much we’re creating. (I remade these two charts to make them prettier for the internets. Feel free to steal/share.)
Fascinating:
- “Wal-Mart processes 1M transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes”
- “Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP between them have spent more than $15 billion on buying software firms specializing on data management and analytics.” (And to think I had to ARGUE with people about the value of this whole digital thing.)
- Bing’s Farecast service analyzes 225 million flight and price records to give you better deals.
- CERN’s Large Hadron Collider generates 40 terabytes every second (when it’s on).
- “By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco.”
Data are cool. More on this later.
