The Internet of Things Meets Big Data

The Internet of Things is coming—are you ready? As Big Think reported recently in our interview with leading economist Jeremy Rifkin, the Internet of Things will connect everyone and everything in a seamless network. How will it intersect with Big Data?   

Chris Curran, the Chief Technologist of PwC, spoke to Big Think about this great technological shift:

Most of the data we think about from an enterprise perspective is sort of modular, it’s transactional, it’s a call center call or it’s a web transaction or it’s a sale or it’s a quote or it’s a piece of data about a product.  But the Internet of Things will be creating streams of data.  So one of the analogies is how social media creates streams of data.  So we’ve got tweets and we’ve got flows on our wall and such that are more streams of information.  And so think about a sensor that might be on a door in a warehouse.  Every time the door opens the sensor records a door opening, a time of day, a day of the week.  Maybe it creates some other ambient information –  it records the temperature in the facility or it records how long the door was open or whatever.  So these are little bits of data that are happening every time the door is open. And that door might be open a lot of times during an hour or a day or a week or a month, but it’s creating these streams of data.  And it’s not like that one piece of data might be that interesting, but it’s the trends and the patterns and things that we’re looking for in the data that may be what we’re looking for.

The Internet of Things will of course lead to an unimaginable explosion of data. Listening to that data, making sense of it, and effectively acting on that information will be essential, and this massive shift that’s underway will no doubt help businesses do just that.

For more on Curran’s discussion of the Internet of Things and how it will bring us smarter, faster Big Data, watch this clip from Big Think’s interview: