Last updated on August 3rd, 2023 at 10:34 am
Let’s go back to the time when we all had no idea whatsoever about social media or the internet of things. This was the time when the concept of a personal computer, did not really exist. All these desktops were supposed to do, was to store information, to help in some calculations as a part of other related activities. This was also the time when normal storage devices, were not really normal. They used to be sold at very exorbitant prices and would set you back by more than just a few thousand rupees. Anyone who has an idea about this situation, may be pleasantly surprised of how cheap these storage devices have become lately. If you happen to be an individual with very less requirement for storage space, you might as well not buy a storage device for all intents and purposes. Meaning, why buy a hard disk, when you have free space available to you to store your things.
Today there are so many applications online, for instance Google or the famous Drop Box, these applications are providing users with up to 15 gigabytes of free storage space, to store everything they want to. With the advent of mobile phones with great storage capacities, the need to buy a pen drive has almost become negligible. Now one would wonder, how exactly would it benefit these companies to lower their storage costs. One thing is definitely sure, these companies benefit by having all of this data, in order to enhance their very service offerings. In more technical terms, it allows these companies to generate big data and thus go ahead and use it for their profit. Today, with the great advancement in every single field, due to the massive explosion of developing technology, has also led to a tremendous generation of data. In the field of Data Science, the jargon they use for this process is a person’s digital footprint. Think of it as a carbon footprint, but devoid of the negative connotations. This digital footprint of every individual consists of the data they generate, by their various dealings online, which in turn are used by companies to enhance their chances of success.
Have you every stopped and wondered, how when you open any page on your browser, you have ads of the exact things, that you were looking for about two days before. This is exactly the power of Big Data. The whole idea here is trying to map someone’s digital identity get all the information regarding the person’s likes, dislikes and then present that person with every kind of enhancement possible, from targeted recommendations, to even someday finding out if we could make clones of that person, based on their social media activities. This concept of big data is gradually, yet very effectively changing the way the world works, making it smarter, more efficient and faster. There are many theories that in the future, we would be even able to develop robots, create our own personas in the virtual world, have the most heightened artificial intelligence technologies and basically be able to harness our data a rich surroundings to their optimum potential.
