Who would have imagined 20 years ago that the cyber airwaves would be jam packed with chaotic social chatter? That people would be sharing everything about everything with everyone, in real time?
Through our constant Tweeting, Blogging, Face-booking, You-Tubing, Skyping, Linking-in, Instant Messaging and general need to communicate on a micro and global level our lives have changed forever.
On a social level it’s liberating and on a business level it’s empowering. The world has shrunk. Everyone can contact anyone at any time and more or less for free. Wow! So out of this plethora of data, companies are looking at new ways of harvesting the information.
How do you pick out the most relevant sound bites, trends and ultimately opportunities to help turn thattorrent of data into gold?
The opportunity to develop the killer App for social media is there for us all to see. For software developers this is the equivalent of the Californian Gold Rush. The new 49’ers are entrepreneurial start-ups, media junkies and chancers who are dipping their toes into the social media maelstrom. The problem is that the data has been super sized.
It’s not a case of panning for information gold in a slow running river or stream but casting your net into a Tsunami of data. Pack your water wings and hold on tight because to get something “really” useful out of this lot is going to take a lot of sampling, a lot of bandwidth and a whole lot of imagination.
I’ve been looking around at some of the new applications and services that are being launched on an almost daily basis. I’ve been tweeting and listening to the social chatter and adding a bit of my own. I’ve been watching closely what the BI providers are doing and how they are looking to integrate with social media. I’ve been watching what the big database boys are doing to scale their databases to support “big data” and doing the same our selves with our search technology.
There is so much going on in the BI world because the data landscape has changed forever. What legacy BI products have done for the last 30+ years has not changed very much because the data environment (capture and storage) up until recent years had changed very little.
The explosion of data over the last few years has been a “game changer” for any supplier who claims to offer any enterprise a holistic view of relevant data. These are challenging but exciting times in the world of BI and Social Media so start panning for gold and prepare to get very wet!
Thu, 19/05/2011 – 12:27 — Richard Lewis .
Posted by david ricketts 
