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An employee displays a big data control platform to highlight public safety events at an e-commerce fairin Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.
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Big data has become a catchword in business circles. One often hears of companies,enterprises or even governments going gaga over the technology and the innumerable economicbenefits it brings in its train.
Like most of my peers, I have employed the term often, without really understanding what bigdata has in store.
So I was a bit taken aback when my old school friend called me up to get my take on big dataand how it is being used effectively in China.
Let me confess, my knowledge of big data till then was peripheral: that it was the huge amount ofinformation created through online activities and transactions and something that is used todiscover trends and make predictions.
The quest for a more cogent answer was, however, an eye-opener of sorts.
I was surprised to learn that in the past five years, China has been at the forefront of severalpioneering big data initiatives and private enterprises are showing the way.
Internet search giant Baidu Inc, for instance, is using big data to understand and track diseasepatterns, with the data being offered to hospitals so they can stock the requisite medicines andpersonnel during epidemic outbreaks.
Tencent Holdings Ltd, the tech firm that runs the WeChat mobile chat network, is using socialdata to identify trendsetters across categories for target marketing.
While Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China's largest e-commerce company, is using a wealth offinancial information from its Taobao and Alipay channels to identify potential funding candidates.
"When industry begins to make better use of big data, it will definitely make a big difference,"said Liu Pinyuan, an expert on smart cities at the China Academy of Space Technology, addingthat although government use of big data is still in its infancy, policymakers are well abreast of itshuge value.
According to Liu, the forthcoming 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) will include a national big datastrategy, with an added emphasis on opening and sharing of data resources.
But some experts believe that big data is already losing steam.
Global market research firm Gartner Inc in its latest report says that while big data enjoyed bighype in 2014, it has all but fallen off the "map for 2015".
Part of the reason why the hype is fizzling out is because most of the technologies that were bignews last year, are already in use and are no longer big news, Gartner said.
Bernanrd Marr, a leading global expert on big data, however, presents a different spin.
The Gartner report does not imply that big data is no longer relevant, he said. Rather, most of theemerging technologies mentioned by Gartner like autonomous vehicles, machine learning, andthe Internet of Things, all produce and rely on ever-larger quantities of data.
Marr goes on to buttress the point with some mind-boggling data of his own.
"We are positively swimming in it, and that's not going to change.
"By 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every humanbeing on the planet. By then, accumulated digital knowledge will be around 44 zettabytes, or 44trillion gigabytes, up from just 4.4 zettabytes today," he said.
According to Marr, the problem is that the ability to properly analyze big data and drawconclusions from it is not keeping pace with the rate at which it is being created.
"Only 0.5 percent of the data we create is ever analyzed and used.
"Imagine the potential that exists in even another fraction of that information? Just a 10 percentincrease in data accessibility will result in more than $65 million additional net income for atypical Fortune 1,000 company," he said.
Much like Marr, I also believe that big data will persist, and it will become an even bigger part ofeveryday life, whether it's hyped up or not, due to the sheer economics behind it.
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