Juan Antonio Ruiz
In 2013, an influential McKinsey report stated that data science would be the number one catalyst for economic growth. McKinsey identified one of the new opportunities for launching the era of Big Data. A growing torrent of data. This refers to the idea that data seems to be coming in continuously and at a rapid pace.
Think about this, today you can buy a hard drive to store all the music in the world for not much money. It's an incredible storage capacity compared to any previous form of music storage. In 2010 there were 5 billion mobile phones in use. Many more today. These phones and the apps we install on them are a huge source of Big Data, all the time, every day.
And Facebook, which recently just set the record for having one billion users connected in a single day, has more than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month (and this number is from 2013).
All this leads us to projections of great growth. 40% in global data per year, and 5% in global IT spending. But, there is something else that contributes to the catalytic power of Data Science. It's called Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is one of the ways computing has become something we can do anytime, anywhere. This new capability, combined with the torrent of data, gives us the opportunity to perform unusual, dynamic and scalable data analysis that gives us a lot of information about our world and ourselves. In short, this huge torrent of data combined with anytime, anywhere computing power makes this new era of Big Data possible.
