Analytics for the Greater Good

Take a look at the companies most effectively using Big Data and analytics to make billions of dollars: Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and Google top the list. Make no mistake: these behemoths lead the pack. In the process, they have made countless employees and shareholders very wealthy individuals. For instance, consider Google’s remarkable stock performance.

To say that Big Data can only equate to big money, however, would be a vast oversimplification. Increasingly, some of the brightest minds are deciding to concentrate their efforts on humanitarian goals overly purely financial ones. Perhaps most famously, when data scientist extraordinaire Jeffrey Hammerbacher left Facebook to found Cloudera four years ago he said, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." (Watch a fascinating interview with him here.)

The Uses of Big Data Are Virtually Unlimited