About
This blog is dedicated to exploring the disruptive changes underway in global data markets.
We live in an economy exploding with data. In any given minute, databases somewhere are tracking mouse clicks on web sites, point of sale purchases, rider swipes through subway turnstyles, physician prescriptions, digital video recorder rewinds, and the location of every GPS-enabled car and phone on the planet. And on any given day, this data is being stored, analyzed, and exchanged.
The economics of data aggregation, analysis, and exchange are being disrupted by two forces: the growth in bandwidth and connectivity of the Internet, and the falling cost of computational power. Greater connectivity has made it possible to put ever more devices online, from cars to cash registers. Less expensive computation and storage has made it practical to store and analyze the growing deluge of data streamed from these devices.
Just as shifts in the global energy markets have made extracting oil from Canada’s Athabasca sands profitable, disruptive forces in data markets are transforming a growing share of the world’s data — previously offline or considered too costly to acquire – into untapped sources of value.
This blog is authored by Michael E. Driscoll and Jason R. Morton.