5 Big Data News You Should Know Today - 20 October 2012 Tweet

1.  Big Brother meets Big Data: Governments start scrutinizing credit card records

The economy is so bad in Argentina that the government recently said it would start taxing overseas credit card purchases. It also demanded that banks report all credit card transactions -- foreign or domestic -- saying the data would be used to find tax cheats.

Even George Orwell couldn't have imagined this meeting of Big Brother and Big Data: a handy database of every single purchase made by citizens, ready to becategorized and analyzed by the government. Let your mind wander for a moment and you can imagine the disturbing possibilities of a government so invasive that it knows when and where you buy milk and bread.

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2. Big Data: 4 things you need if you’re going to mine it effectively

With all the talk of “Big” data from vendors and their sale forces, consultants excited by new opportunities and business people grappling with whether or not their revenue will go up, it is vital to understand the “Big” picture and the best way to do this is see where architecturally everything fits together.

Getting an understanding of the integrated architecture of Big Data is vital if any organisation is to understand how much of their current investment in their information environments including items like hardware, software tools and people’s skill sets can stay, need to be replaced or be upgraded.

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3. Batten down the analysts, it’s a big data-BI storm

Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act.

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4. Enhancing customer experience tops big data agenda: Survey

Most big data initiatives currently being deployed by organizations are aimed at enhancing customer experience, said a report byIBM and Said Business School at the University of Oxford. Despite a strong focus on customers, less than half of the organizations engaged in big data are currently collecting and analyzing external sources of data.

Social media and other external data are being underutilized due to the skills gap.Having advanced capabilities requires analyzing unstructured data - which includes geospatial data, voice, images and video - as well as streaming data remains a major challenge for most organizations. Less than 25% of the survey respondents say they have the required capabilities to analyze highly unstructured data - a major inhibitor to getting the most value from big data. Organizations need to embrace and manage data uncertainty and determine how to use it to their advantage.

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5. How M2M and Big Data will combine to produce everyday benefits

While Big Data has evolved into one of 2012's most buzz-worthy topics, one of the next big buzz topics -- machine-to-machine (M2M) communications or "the Internet of Things" -- is actually going to make Big Data even more powerful.

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Tags: Big Data News