Big data Era

McKinsey, a global consulting firm, was the first to propose the arrival of the era of big data. The mining and use of vast amounts of data portends a new wave of productivity growth and consumer surplus. "Big data" has existed for a long time in the fields of physics, biology, environmental ecology and military, financial and communications industries, but it has attracted people's attention due to the development of the Internet and information industry in recent years.

In 2012, the term "big data" has been more and more mentioned. People use it to describe and define the massive data generated in the era of information explosion, and name related technological development and innovation. It has been on the cover of the column of the New York times and the Wall Street journal, entered the news on the official website of the White House, appeared in some domestic internet-themed lectures and salons, and even been written into the investment recommendation report by the olfactory guojin securities, guotai junan, galaxy securities, etc.

Data is rapidly expanding and becoming larger, which determines the future development of enterprises. Although many enterprises may not realize the hidden trouble caused by the explosive growth of data, people will increasingly realize the importance of data to enterprises over time.

As the New York times put it in a February 2012 column, the era of "big data" has arrived, and in business, economics and beyond, decision-making will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than experience and intuition.

"This is a revolution," says Gary king, a sociology professor at Harvard University. "the sheer volume of data has led to a quantitative process in every field, from academia to business to government.

Today's society is a fast-developing society with advanced science and technology and information circulation. People are communicating more and more closely and living more and more conveniently. Big data is the product of this high-tech era.

With the advent of the cloud era, big data has attracted more and more attention. Big data is usually used to describe the large amount of unstructured and semi-structured data created by a company, which will cost too much time and money when downloaded to a relational database for analysis. Big data analytics are often associated with cloud computing because real-time large data set analysis requires frameworks like MapReduce to distribute work to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers.

In today's society, the application of big data shows its advantages more and more, and it occupies more and more fields. E-commerce, O2O, logistics and distribution, etc., various fields that make use of big data for development are assisting enterprises to constantly develop new business and innovate operation mode. With the concept of big data, the judgment of consumer behavior, the prediction of product sales volume, accurate marketing range and inventory replenishment have been comprehensively improved and optimized.

"Big data" in the Internet industry refers to the phenomenon that Internet companies generate and accumulate data about users' network behaviors in their daily operations. The scale of the data is so large that it cannot be measured in terms of G or T.

How big is big data? A set of data called "one day on the Internet" tells us that all the content produced by the Internet can be engraved on 168 million DVDS a day. It sends 294bn e-mails (equivalent to two years' worth of paper letters in America). 2 million community posts (the equivalent of 770 years of time magazine writing); It sold 378,000 phones, more than the 371,000 babies born every day worldwide.

Big data is the development and accumulation of information and communication technology up to now. According to its own logic of technological development, it grows naturally from improving production efficiency to more advanced intelligence stage. The ubiquitous information perception and collection terminals collect massive amounts of data for us, while the continuous progress of computing technology represented by cloud computing provides us with powerful computing power, which builds a digital world parallel to the physical world around the behavior of individuals and organizations.

The most striking example is the social media monitoring platform DataSift's monitoring of the correlation between Facebook's emotional tilt on Twitter on the day of the IPO and the volatility of Facebook's share price. The mood on Twitter turned negative before Facebook opened, and 25 minutes later Facebook's share price began to fall. And as the sentiment turned positive on Twitter, Facebook shares started to bounce back eight minutes later. Eventually, as the stock market neared the close and emotion turned negative on Twitter, Facebook's share price started to fall again 10 minutes later. The bottom line: every turn of emotional inclination on Twitter affects the volatility of Facebook's stock price.

This is just one of many examples of big data being generated by social networks to "see the future," as well as Google's ability to predict flu outbreaks through Internet searches. Not only in terms of business, but also in terms of social construction, big data is also amazing. The booming rise of smart power grid, smart transportation, smart medical treatment, smart environmental protection and smart city is closely related to the development of big data technology and application.

The great value that "big data" may bring is gradually recognized by people. It provides people with a new way of looking at the world through the innovation and development of technology and the comprehensive perception, collection, analysis and sharing of data. Making decisions more based on facts and data is a way of thinking that, predictably, will force big changes in some societies that are accustomed to operating on a "more or less" basis.