An article, published some days ago in Businessweek, by Ashlee Vance, is trying to describe in simple words some of the uses of data mining. With some examples that catch the eye, such that of predicting a crime based on a certain behaviour (Minority Report reference) or customer analytics (market-basket analysis) that Wal-Mart and other stores use, the story of the creation of Hadoop in 2006 and how companies took advantage of this technology.
Now a second wave of startups is finding ways to use cheap but powerful servers to analyze new categories of data such as blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, DNA sequences, and medical images. “The old days were about asking, ‘What is the biggest, smallest, and average?’ ” says Michael Olson, CEO of startup Cloudera. “Today it’s, ‘What do you like? Who do you know?’ It’s answering these complex questions.”
Most of what you’d like to say to your friends about data mining but you couldn’t find the correct sequence of words to do so.
[Data Analytics: Crunching the Future]
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