FinHow

Big Data has been the talk of the business community in recent time. Can someone really start a venture out of Big Data?

What is Big Data?

Big data didn’t suddenly appear. It got its name when organizations realized that the amount of data growth is so large that they can’t scale up the infrastructure to derive value out of it. Not only were organizations gathering more data, more data started pouring in with the proliferation of social media.

1. Facebook has 1.11 billion active users as on March 2013 up from 100 million in Aug 2008 as per Wikipedia
2. Twitter has 200 million active users as on Feb 2013 generating over 340 million tweets daily as per Wikipedia
3. Google processes 1 billion search requests and 24 peta-bytes of user generated data each day as per Wikipedia

These are just the giants that I described and there are millions of others who are generating huge amount of publicly available data.

How does Big Data look like?

Big data is a huge amount of data that is generated at a very fast rate, from different sources and that has varying level of reliability of correctness. Organizations are giving shape, size and structure to this data to derive useful information out of it. Some of the ways, information is presented is as follows:

1. Google presents information in search results. Visualization of search terms is in Google trends
2. Twitter lets one search for a trend using hashtag. 
3. Blogs and other websites structure it in tag clouds 

   Tags

   Credit Card Engineering GDP Gold Growth Rate Home Loan HUF Insurance Law Mutual Fund Real Estate Scam SEBI

4. IBM Shows it in Matrix of different colors (picture has been resized to fit this page) 

What can I do?

The challenges with Big data includes capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. One may start a venture in which he can provide one/more of the following services:

1. The generated data may have duplicate/invalid information. One may work on Data cleansing or preparing filters to remove the noise from data so that good data can be used to derive useful information.
2. Since SQL databases are not useful to process petabytes of data, technical personnel may look for alternative technologies (No SQL).
3. One may even look for distributed processing involving individuals’ personal computer processing power just as bitcoin mining involves personal computing power.
4. One may become a facilitator to provide continuous stream of data to consumers of the data.
5. One may look at the ways to safeguard (both cyber security and physical security) the huge amount of data.
6. There is an opportunity to provide data centers to store big data.
7. A project was started earlier that said collective consciousness of the world. With that amount of information available one may derive collective consciousness of the world.
8. One may find the positive trends for an organization and spot negativities for an organization.
9. One may find the next industry that will grow. This can be helpful for investment industry.
10. Not only one may start a venture, jobs are already on the rise for Data Scientists.

There are many new ventures coming up in the field of Big Data, however, the field is so wide and growing so fast that there is an opportunity to solve challenges for any entrepreneur. Will you start your venture in Big Data? If yes, go ahead and share your story, if no, stay tuned for next idea.