Published on March 13th, 2015 | by Diogo Costa

The Revolutionary Potential of Big Data

It is a bit hard to define Big Data when the revolutionary potential lies in its own definition. No technology has had such an impact since the 15th century, with the invention of printing by Gutenberg – the incredible amount of digital data being produced by the Internet is about to cause a revolution in all areas of human knowledge.

Volume, variety and veracity are three from the four “V”s that indicate the true potential of Big Data, but there is still another important aspect: the Internet is the only artificial network behaving like a natural one, thus having properties of a live system.

Theorists from this subject chose the word velocity to tag that dimension (maybe because it also starts with a V, like the aforementioned three others), and that seems like an adequate choice. Velocity is often linked to speed but that is not exactly the meaning here, though.

The ideal technical word would probably be stream, or dynamic. Network Science suggests that the dynamic of Internet data (or, in other words, Big Data) allows the understanding of how natural networks work. Now you are probably asking why we use Internet data instead of the data from those systems we want to understand.

For one thing, given that it is digital data, Big Data can be analyzed precisely for the relations that its parts (data) establish between them (through links and logs). This means that Big Data can be analyzed in a systematic and dynamic way.

All this theory has strong applications in the real world. In sales, for example, Big Data is helping businesses to get a clearer picture on their clients, therefore being able to be more effective on what they do.

Still, data overwhelming can also be bad in this case, and that is why salespeople need to have the right training in order to become effective data scientists. LeadGenius is a company that provides such a service, giving salespeople the best leads for them to make sales knowing that they are reaching the right person with the right product.

With lots of Zetabytes of data predicted for the near future, getting a grip on Big Data will be important not only for sales and business, but almost for every field of our society.

Tags: big data, data, Internet, sales