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What is Big Data?
As more businesses and institutions start to leverage on Big Data to grow business and solve the challenges, more people might wonder what is “Big Data”? It was introduced in 1998 by John Mashey. The term is more commonly used in 2005 when more people began to use online social networks and generated a large amount of data from online activities.
Simply put in words, Big Data refers to a large and complex amount of data that can’t be processed by traditional software or computers. It has main three characteristics: Great volume of data that receive in fast velocity collected in real-time, complex and high variety.
Functions of Big Data
There are many ways to use Big Data. The common application in the business industry is Data Analytics. Big Data help companies to understand more about the consumers’ behaviours and predict the possibles outcomes for the future. It is done through analysing the collected data and studying the trends. Companies can make better decisions and reduce possible risks. Eventually creates customer satisfaction and retention.
Let’s take Netflix as an example. When the user creates an account, Netflix will receive the demographic information of the user. From there, Netflix will suggest films that the user might like to watch. Whenever the users search for keywords or press any buttons, data is generated. Those data assist Netflix to suggest more related content that the user might like. With more data collected from the users, Netflix is able to predict what are the current trends that viewers like to watch and decide which genre to source.
Big Data in Our Daily Life
There are many ways of application on Big Data. Without realizing, Big Data has become an impactful factor in our daily life. Simple things such as Google Maps can help people to predict traffic based on past data and help the driver to plan ahead of the route, a more personalized music playlist in Spotify and also maintaining your personal health or exercise records in your smartwatch. All these technologies are aiming to bring more convenience to people.
However, this might raise an issue in trust especially on how the company will use those data. One of the examples that are relatable to most people is online shopping. we will be likely recommended the product based on our past search history in the search engine. The company marketing team uses data to help the customer find the products that they might want to buy. On the other side, some customers might feel that the company is manipulative in promoting the products and data security can be a concern as the company need to store a large amount of data.
To Conclude…
We can’t deny that Big Data has brought more convenience and improved the way we live our life. Companies will still need to continue taking care of data security and prevent misuse of the collected data from the consumers. This is only the tip of the iceberg about Big Data, hope that this article able to give a brief explanation about Big Data.
