Toon Timbermont

Do we want to make (all) our data useful?

In my last post, I put computing power & data as the ingredients for new insights. Just a couple of thought on these topics…

Computing power

Fact 1: My dad’s 1st PC (he was incredibly proud of it) run on a 3.3 MHz processor. Now my phone runs 528 (and it is a sloooooow phone ;).

Fact 2: You get an hour of “Quadruple Extra Large” server power for $2,10. Quite different from the days when the “computing centre” of the university was working with reservations to test your lines of code…

Conclusion: for almost any use case, obtaining the computing power is not an issue any more.

Data Storage

Fact 1: I was in fifth grade of high school when a classmate’s dad bought a PC with a hard disk of 500Mb. We had a collective laugh: how the hell would he fill all that?

Fact 2: More than 48 hours of video are uploaded toYouTube every minute, according to the company’s official blog (may 2011).

Conclusion: Storing big amounts of data is not the issue any more.

Turning Data into Information

How to make data useful. That has always been (and will probably remain so for a while) the fundamental challenge. Today’s technology makes it possible to store massive amounts of data and use the computing power to (try to) get insights out of it, but the data still has to be collected and centralized.

And there is my dual relation with location aware applications again. In a virtual world where things are no longer forgotten (once it is in a google data centre, will it ever get out?), insights may (and will) arise when you do not expect it. Most of them will be good, but some may turn out differently.

Open Data versus Private Data

Some people say that data wants to be open. Others start projects to open datasets (willingly or not). Some people say that any data collected by public services (and hence paid by the tax payers) should be open, etc. etc…

But do we really want all of our data open? Do we want our tax declaration to be publicly available - after all it is collected by the ministry of finance! And what about really private stuff like medical information?

I’ve seen some really useful applications of the data that is now openly available, but there is a clear need to think which data should be open & which data should be protected.

But that’s for a next post :)