What lies ahead: Data

Tim O'Reilly on the calculus of data, predictive analytics, and why mobile sensors are central to his thinking about the future.

Are companies catching on to the importance of data?

Tim O'Reilly: For a long time, data was a secret hiding in plain sight. It became clear to me quite a while ago that it was the key to competitive advantage in the Internet era. That was one of the points in my Web 2.0 paper back in 2005. It's pretty clear that everybody knows about it now. There are "chief data scientists" at companies like LinkedIn and Bit.ly. Data and algorithms are at the heart of what so many companies are doing, and that's just going to accelerate.

There's more data every day, and we're going to see creative applications that use data in new ways. Take Square, for example. It's a payment company that's hoping to do some degree-of-risk mitigation via social network analysis. Will that really work? Who knows? Even Google is struggling with the limits of algorithmic curation.

There was a story in the New York Times recently about a guy who figured out that getting lots of negative comments led to a high Page Rank. That raises new questions. Google doesn't like to do manual intervention, so they're saying to themselves, "How can we correct this algorithmically?" [Note: Google responded with an algorithmic solution.]

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Source: radar.oreilly.com
By: Mac Slocum