Sunday, February 28, 2010
Data, data everywhere
This article is a special report in The Economist on managing information in the wake of the "Big Data" phenomena. Information has gone from scarce to superabundant and with such astronomical amounts of information has come a host of new problems. As information expands and is shared around the world ensuring data security and protecting privacy becomes increasingly difficult. The explosion of information has in turn given way to an emerging industry in information management- helping organizations make sense of their abundant data. Hal Varian, google's chief economist, explains "data is widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them."
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This article points out some very interesting things in relation to markets and information. It was once thought that it would be very hard to ever have complete information. This failure of the perfect market is becoming less and less true. It is now possible to have perfect information for a market. The problem now is how to manage and handle all this information, as the article describes. It is very likely that information technology could be the "hot" industry in which to start a company. It will probably attract some of the smartest and creative minds to figure out how to handle such vast quantities of information.
It would be interesting if the authors of this article believed that if the emergence of the Internet was a powerful contributor to the abundance of information, the cost of publishing, trading, and retrieving information had become so low that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to be profitable on a large scale. Potentially some sectors could be very profitable, but imagine a company trying to make a profit off of news...people would abandon the site, go to some blogger who did buy the prescription and paid for his free distribution with advertising, and get the information free there.
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