big data

Terabytes, Petabytes, Exabytes. Who can keep track? These strange terms have just begun to enter the business lexicon, but the hype surrounding them has reached a fever pitch. We have undoubtedly entered the age of big data.

Yet it’s hard for many to take it seriously.  While the blogosphere buzzes and millennials preach, most serious business people are focused on their jobs. They have partners, customers and employees to keep happy and all the techy mumbo jumbo just doesn’t seem relevant.

When the oil tycoon John Paul Getty was asked about his rules for success, he reportedly said, “Rise early, work hard, strike oil.”

It’s a funny line, but it seems positively quaint now. It’s hard to imagine young entrepreneurs these days looking to find their fortune in resource extraction. The days of wildcat wells have long been replaced by an industry that’s dominated  by geologists, geopolitics and an unruly band of petro-dictators.

If you are to believe the talk of twitter-town and its suburbs, due to the connectivity of numerous devices worldwide, we (will) also have available so much data, it is just waiting to be mined and will change how we do, well..,  just about everything. All this is being referred to as Big Data. The problem with all this data of course is the filtering.