Question

So a lot of us are talking about big data problem. I know some applications, like page rank, k-means and other machine learning algorithms and also web indexing and so on.

Does anybody know any other kind of big data applications.

Answer 1

This is an era of collective intelligence. Every day, we create approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. It is estimated that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This is the velocity at which we are producing data! New sources of these kind of data are piling up with each passing day.

This data which comes from online footprints each and everyone of us leave daily umpteen number of times, various kind of sensors used to gather climate information, our posts to social media sites, our digital pictures and videos, text messages, online sell/purchase transaction records, cell phone GPS signals, and daily news articles served over millions of handsets to name a few. This data is Bigdata.

But if we talk in pure technical terms:

When it becomes difficult to store, search, analyse, share etc. a
given amount of data using our traditional database management tools,
that large and complex dataset is called to be Bigdata.

Industry has soon realized the potential of data-mining. Hence, processing or analyzing a combined huge dataset rather than various smaller datasets separately is bound to provide more insights/trends/patterns. For example with historical data available for cab bookings for a cab agency, it can be predicted with much likelihood that where in the city, which type of cab and at what time of the day a cab should be parked for hire!

Bigdata is very difficult to be handled by conventional ways of processing. It may require massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers. For large organizations like Google and Apple setting up such server clusters might be feasible but it isn’t for smaller players. But then advances in commodity hardware, cloud architectures and community driven open source softwares bring Bigdata processing into the reach of the lesser ones too. Bigdata processing is getting more and more feasible for even startups, who can simply rent server time in the cloud instead of building own server rooms and what not.

Advances in Bigdata affects us on daily basis! Be it the ‘friends suggestion’ on Facebook or the ‘personalized ads’ on Google. Industry is constantly mining data(actually The Bigdata) to provide highly personalized user experience and simultaneously create a new kind of advertising business where in the advertiser knows before hand what you need to buy!

So there you go, lot of practical examples of Bigdata.

Source: bigdataspeak