The below is a transcript of the speech that at the Sharq Youth Conference on 7th October 2017 in Istanbul Turkey.
Transcript:
I’m here to tell you what you need to know about the mega trend, that is big data
The value of data – is exponentially increasing, But before we talk about value of data, I want to talk about pies.
So, have a guess, at what is America’s favourite pie?
The common thought would be the Apple pie, and 5-10 years ago, you’d be right.
But guess what happens when the supermarkets decided to launch 11cm, a single serve pie?
Apple was no longer the best selling pie. Why? With a 30cm pie – because you have to share it with family and friends – apple pie is actually everyone’s second pick.
To give you background into why I’m interested in this
I work at RB.com & StartupBus
RB – is a world leader in consumer healthcare and more recently in infant nutrition
Startupbus – is the worlds most intense statup hackathon –
Where unicorns such as instacart was born
What I’m interested in: is how we bring together vast sets of data with consumers, internal business systems, media buys, external patterns and commericalise it to solve problems and unlock new revenue.
So the burning question – What’s is big Data & what makes it big?
Big data is right time business insight and decision making at Extreme Scale
In this presentation today, we are going to explore the 5 Vs of Big Data
Velocity
Variety
Veracity
Volume
& finally Value
But first – what are the trends that are driving us here?
1. Storage cost of data is coming down
2. CPU Cost – data processing costs are coming down
3. Number of connections to the internet & amount of data we produce going up
4. Cost of internet connectovity is going down
But let me show how I’ve grown up with these trends over the last 30 years
Back in 1993, my dad bought our first computer a 386 for $3000. The computer was running MS-DOS and there were limited Apps we could get for the computer
Fast forward 10 years – when I’m at high school, dial up internet starts to take off but LAN gaming was the big thing.
By the time I’m at univeristy – the first Iphone has launcha nd facebook starts its journey. This is also the time when cloud computing starts and we see billions of users with internet connectivity
And now.. We have whats called “ambient computing” – with billions of users, apps, sensors, devices. That’s a picture of my daughter, who regularly asks “alexa, tell me a a joke story”
So is the world we live in today
Going back to the 5 V’s – over the next few slides we are going to go over what each one of these mean
Volume.
A common iPhone holds 128GB of data, back in 1992 we weren’t even producing that much data per day. Versus now, we’re producing 400 iphones worth of data a second
So in 2017, every minute of the day – the amount of data we’re creating on this planet is mind blowing.. And it continuous to grow day on day, hour on hour.
Every minute we send over 500k snapchats.. Half of which is likely to be out gulf countries… 3.6m google searches & the weather channel is processing 18m data requests
Velocity
Refers to the speed at which data is created, processed, stored and analysed. Modern cars have over 100 sensors monitoring everything from fuel usage, to engine wear. I’m not even going into self driving cars which have even more systems running on them
But to put this into perspective, there over 18 billion network connections today to the internet 2.5 / per living human being today – and this number continues to grow.
Variety
We’re foing to spend some time discussing this different types of data, be it text, audio, video, sensor data, click streams, log files.
2 types of data – structured vs. unstructured data
Structured data = when we have a common & identifiable marker to tell us what it is.
Exampe – when you fill in an online form, first name, last name email – are fields from we can understand your inputs
Unstructured data – is things that aren’t so easy to classify. E.g. social posts, videos, images
Just note that 90% of the data is currently unstructured, which is by we need all this tech to decipher and make sense of it/ What I’m trying to understand in my job – is almost everything about the customer that buys my products. With the intention of serving them better and selling them more of my products
Veracity
Which is the uncertainty we have with data quality and integrity. Say you’re an ecommerce company and you have list of 1m email addresses for people who like your brand but you only ship products inside Europe, and 90% of your emails subscribers are from outside EU that email wont have a high sales/conversion rate = but does that mean email doesn’t work?
Finally on value
Let me remind of the world we live in today
Uber has no taxi
Airbnb no real estate
Facebook – makes no content
Alibaba – has no inventory
So what can we do?
The previous slides show you that theres a lot of possibilities and opportunities to do with data. I’m personally interested in healthcare & marketing technologies behind that
But also think that Agriculture & manufacturing will be massively impacted – as we see population growth and climate change impacting more of our world
So what should you do?
This is a chart showing you how to become a data scientist – which is a combination of Computer science, mathematics and Domain expertise.
Not everyone can be a data scientist, but there is nothing stopping you from understanding the data points in your field of work. Which is what we’re going to explore at the big data workshop
Which leads me to my final thought
Big data’s power does not erase the need for Vision and Insight – we still need very smart people to continue being very smart people in each of your fields