Predictive Analytics Archives - The Sand Reckoner

IBM – $3billion in IoT and Weather Company tie-up

March 31, 2015 by Simon Fabri

While there is nothing particularly exceptional about an Internet of Things – related announcement, this one is pretty big, at least in dollar terms. IBM has announced this morning that it will create a new Internet of Things business, consolidating its existing activities in its Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities initiatives. The numbers are quite striking – $4 billion to be invested over three years, and 2000 consultants, developers and researchers assigned to it. The key capabilities IBM will bring … Read more…

Big data predictions in the online and physical world

January 14, 2015January 14, 2015 by Simon Fabri

One piece of news that hit the headlines this week was the revelation from researchers from the University of Cambridge and Stanford University that Facebook may be a better judge of personalities than spouses or friends. Apart from the obvious hype value this is particularly significant as it shows the power of machine learning in scenarios which we intuitively feel should be difficult for algorithms to handle. Instead it turns out the the inherent lack of subjective bias and prejudice … Read more…

Internet of Things and Big Data – The concept of Data Gravity

January 13, 2015November 21, 2014 by Simon Fabri

A number of posts in this blog have dealt with the increasing variety and sheer number of ‘things’, be they sensors, wearables, appliances, actuators, industrial components etc. that will gain connectivity over the coming few years. There will however be no point adding connectivity to these items if they do not produce meaningful data, and in turn there will be no point collating this data unless insights are obtained that can be acted upon. This is why the ‘Internet of Things’ is invariably coupled with its close relative in the family of hyped buzzwords – Mr ‘Big Data’.

To give an example of the scale of data being produced, Cisco estimates that by 2018, connected devices will generate 400 zettabytes of data annually. (I too needed to look that up. Apparently a zettabyte is 10²¹ bytes or 1 billion terabytes).