5 Ways Big Data Will Change Lives In 2013
By Siddharth Taparia, Senior Director, Portfolio and Strategic Marketing, SAP
Recently, I saw firsthand how a new “universal identification” program called Aadhar is taking shape in India. It has potential to improve the lives of millions of poor people via Big Data.
Aadhar is an ambitious government Big Data project aimed at becoming the world’s largest biometric database by 2014, with a goal of capturing about 600 million Indian identities. This could help India’s government and businesses deliver more efficient public services and facilitate direct cash transfers to…
How To Fight Pirates (With Big Data)
Piracy is a serious problem on the world’s seas.
A U.S. consultancy called Oceans Beyond Piracy estimates that pirates caused $7 billion of damage in 2011.
The good news is that, thanks to technological advances, the problem is getting solved.
The International Maritime Bureau reported a 54% drop in piracy incidents during the first half of 2012 versus the same timeframe in 2011.
The reason: Government agencies and law enforcement entities have started harnessing big data to prevent piracy before it happens.
“Big data” is a a buzzy tech term that addresses the nearly boundless amounts…
Without Big Data Life As We Know It Would Be Impossible
Imagine your life today without big data. It’s not conceivable.
Try booking an international flight without big data. For a boarding pass to be generated, your itinerary must pass through a few massive databases—from ticketing to no-fly lists—before you get confirmation from whatever online booking system you use. You won’t make it to the departure gate without the help of big data.
Before you leave for the airport from chilly, drizzly London in November…
The Obstacles In Big Data
Big Data is defined by Wikipedia as “data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly-used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time.”
Big data is everywhere and almost everyone’s contributing to it.
It predicts what you’ll purchase next, it’s turning the healthcare industry upside down, and it predicted the outcome of the 2012 election before the votes were in.
But as the old adage goes, if it’s too good to be true, it…
Who Controls The Present Controls The Future
“Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past” is a quote from George Orwell’s 1984 where we first see the concept of Big Brother.
In the book, the control of information is used to sinister ends, but it got me thinking about controlling the present and understanding the past in business and how it can help us to shape the future particularly in the SME environment where there is not always big money to throw at the problem.
Businesses no matter…
Just “A New Way to Make Money”?
Big Data – a blessing or a curse? We asked expert Pavlo Baron to explain how businesses should approach the topic of Big Data and about the new career prospects that are evolving in its wake.
Photo: istockphoto.com
Pavlo Baron works for Codecentric AG, a specialist in software development and innovative technologies. Ukraine-born Pavlo heads up the company’s architecture competence center, where he is chiefly concerned with technology management in companies and with the various approaches to using Big Data. He is also an author…
Big Data’s Big Opportunity In The Bleak Economy Of 2013
“Companies that have embraced the future have been rewarded,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said on Mad Money, highlighting SAP’s forward-thinking mindset — and rising stock price. “The company’s last quarter — it was fabulous — it was the best third quarter in its history.”
The 40-year-old enterprise software provider is also poised for a bright 2013 thanks to the past year’s initiatives, including:
SAP HANA’s market blitz
Focus on mobility with integrating Sybase
Acquisition of cloud computing powerhouse Ariba.
Walldorf-based SAP does not even seem to be…
NSF Revises Big Data Research Grant Process
Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are investing in big data research.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are being made available to scholars and researchers to explore the potential of big data to, in the words of the U.S. National Science Foundation, “enable breakthrough discoveries and innovation in science, engineering, medicine, commerce, education, and national security — laying the foundations for US competitiveness for many decades to come.”
Every year the NSF reviews more than 50,000 research grant proposals and funds close to 11,000 annually. Big data researchers, then, are standing in…
Big Data: A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
By Rani Goel, Senior Director, Analytics Product Marketing, SAP
A lot of ink has been spilled relating to big data; countless articles, blog posts and discussions are about how data is growing by leaps and bounds and how companies need the ability to store and manage peta bytes and zeta bytes of data.
Every time I read this, I think, so what? Unless a decision maker can access and analyze this data effectively, it isn’t worth much. If you are serious about managing big data, it’s time to truly visualize it to become…
Empowering Retailers: 9 Tactics for Leveraging Big Data
Like the Universe, the Web is continuously expanding. Online users are not simply engaging each other more easily, they have become data generators. In this role, they are transforming the global economy.
Today, we can find and purchase every kind of item – from the exotic to the mundane – we could ever want, in the color and size we need. No matter where it is now stored. And we can often acquire it for an amount more attractive than the prices changed by local distributors.
Changing the Game
As consumers, we are no…
Big Data: Facts & Figures
By Shandy Lo
Everyone is talking about big data and the challenge of managing ever-increasing floods of data. We’ve collected the most important insights from research on this trend.
Graphic: grasundsterne GmbH
For many people, the term big data conjures up an image of a flood of data that must be stored and managed. But what exactly is the difference between “a lot” of data and “big data”? According to Gartner, information becomes big data when the volume can no longer be managed with normal database tools. Due to…
It’s Big Data, Stupid. What REALLY Made The Difference On Election Day
Okay, who said the key to success is understanding where the technology is?
Filmmaker, James Cameron?
2012 Nobel prize winner in chemistry, Brian K. Kobilka?
President Obama’s Campaign Advisor, David Axelrod?
If you guessed, Cameron or Kobilka, you may be right. I don’t follow everybody on Google or Twitter. But if you picked Axelrod because you saw his interview on Politico.com, right you are. When Politico asked Axelrod what’s the biggest lesson someone running (for election) in 2016 should learn from the Obama campaign, here’s what he said:
“You need to understand where the technology…
Big Social Media Data: 2012 Election Edition
There’s no doubt that social media played a role in reaching the American public during the 2008 presidential election, and that the Obama campaign leveraged it’s existence in the space to their full advantage to reach that new breed of voters – the young and the tech savvy.
In 2008, there were three million Twitter accounts, surely an influential audience that Obama captured and engaged.
In 2012, both the Obama and Romney camps took the same view on their social media outreach – they made it…
Falling RAM Prices Drive In-Memory Database Surge
Companies confronting their big data opportunities face the ever-present enterprise IT problem: performance. Once IT has gathered the relevant information and stored it on hard disk drives (HDD) ready for analytics, delivering responsive queries to business users can be problematic. Mechanical HDDs are simply too sluggish for most big data environments. New approaches are necessary.
That’s why you’re seeing so much attention being paid to in-memory databases. With them, potentially you can load your entire database in a server’s RAM for maximum performance by avoiding the seek-time penalty of HDDs.
As noted by Hasso…
Data Analytics Can Help Feed Planet
Millions of people living today in the Horn of East Africa are currently at risk from a devastating drought. Tens of thousands of refugees have already migrated to other parts of the region. While the ongoing military conflict complicates the problem, it’s the unrelenting drought that is the primary cause of the famine there. It’s a tragedy that tugs at the heart.
Although big data analytics cannot make it rain, it can be used to predict where devastating droughts might occur. Information derived from satellite imagery can give international and regional leaders as well as humanitarian groups advanced…
Big Data Can Mean Big Returns in Retail
Big data for retail means a chance to see why a sale didn’t occur. Is it product selection? Pricing? Store display? Ineffective promotional material?
Before, this information was hard to track, but with the advent of big data and in-memory computing, two products ideally suited to collecting and analyzing unstructured data types like that of retail, are poised to play a significant role in sales.
For example, web logs are not the typical financial data people relate with the term “big data”. This web information shows how…
Big Data Goes Green
Cloud computing is currently receiving a lot of attention. With regard to energy, cloud computing should result in lower costs for users and fewer greenhouse gas emissions by streamlining information-crunching into single facilities on speedy machines.
In 2010 Pike Research found that cloud computing could lead to a 38% reduction in worldwide data-center energy use by 2020, compared with the projected growth of data-center energy consumption without cloud computing developments. The impact of the cloud on CO2 emissions is also potentially huge.
Click here for Renewable Energy World >>
Big Data of Growing Importance to Small Businesses
Small to medium-size enterprises (SMEs) are waking up to the benefits big data can offer their business and are realizing the competitive advantage it can hold, according to an online poll of 154 C-suite executives at international companies, conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of enterprise application software provider SAP.
The survey suggested these businesses are moving faster than their larger competitors to leverage big data, although just 25 percent of respondents could agree on a similar definition of big data—a loosely defined term used to describe large, complex data sets.
Read more on eWeek >>
In a Big Network of Computers, Evidence of Machine Learning
A neural network of computer processors, fed millions of YouTube videos, taught itself to recognize cats, a feat of significance for fields like speech recognition.
Read more on The New York Times >>
Bits Blog: How Big Data Sees Wikipedia
A researcher at the University of Illinois has been looking at Wikipedia as a data resource, concentrating on the connections between cities around the globe over time.
Read more on The New York Times >>
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