TechCocktail Interview on Big Data

In 2011, I did an interview with the folks from TechCocktail on The Age of the Platform. A few months ago, I had a chance to meet the folks from the company here in Las Vegas. Below you can read my second TC interview on the new book:

Tech Cocktail: What does “Big Data” mean?

Phil Simon: You’d think that such a simple term would have a commensurately simple definition, right? It doesn’t. I’ll try to simplify as much as I can.

Most people think of data as rows and columns in an Excel spreadsheet or in an Oracle database. To be sure, that structured (and often transactional) data still matters. Think lists of customers, employees, sales, etc.

Big Data represents mostly unstructured data information found in blog posts, customer reviews, call detail records, tweets, YouTube videos, podcasts, emails, and a host of other sources. Increasingly, more data is generated by machines via sensors. Think the Nest Thermostat, smart grids, and the Internet of Things. There’s no shortage of sources of data. If you aggregate them all, you wind up with Big Data.

To read the whole thing, click here.