Big Data Research

E-commerce site Etsy has grown to 25 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views per month, and it's generating the data volumes to match. Using tools such as Hadoop and Splunk, Etsy is turning terabytes of data per day into a better product.

Does big data have a roll in making the inbound call-center experience more enjoyable for everyone involved?

Predictive analytics, says Deepak Advani of IBM, have a powerful potential role to play:

"Basically, it’s a matter of putting analytics tools to work for customer service reps without them ever having to learn a thing about data analysis. In such a scenario, customer service isn’t left trying to deal with a potentially upset customer while simultaneously trying to find a resolution to his problem because the analytics system has done much of the legwork already."

More: http://gigaom.com/cloud/big-data-making-even-call-centers-intelligent/

Johns Hopkins is taking a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a 100 gigabit per second network to shuttle data from the campus to other large computing centers at national labs and even at Google. The network will be capable of transferring an amount of data equivalent to 80 million file cabinets filled with text each day.

More: http://gigaom.com/2011/11/08/for-science-big-data-is-the-microscope-of-the-21st-century/

This is a good review of the potetional applications of big data with respect to energy, food and water resource management:

"By this time next week, the world will have 7 billion people in it, and this population growth will fundamentally change the way populations use resources like energy, water and food."