Big data: The decisive turn of the game between the great Powers in the future

Whether it's your intention or not, data is making your life notes every day: Where have you been? What do you see? What did you do? Your personality preferences? Contact who? How are you feeling? ...... These are all available from your Web browsing records, transactions, mobile phone records, Unicom video records, email records, social networking records, and so on, and every "footprint" on your network is recorded and stored in the form of data that is accurate, timely and exhaustive. With this data, you can spell a "you" that you know better than yourself.

So what is the value of the "You" depicted by data?

"Wizard" Production Charlie Block (Charlie Brooker), launched by the British "God play" in the Dark Mirror (black Mirror), there has been a very powerful "big Data + cloud computing" products-"reconstituted people", a thought personality can and because of car accidents and premature death of ash. Exactly the same robot.

By analyzing the data that ash left in the Internet world, statistical comparison and organization, and then discover the law, build models, and ultimately achieve accurate "prediction", "robot ash" can be like "real ash" with the living people to talk and respond to and even learn.

The likelihood of big data, of course, will not simply be to make a high-level robot, or it will not cause the whole world to be obsessed and mad: it is considered to be the protagonist of the third wave of human civilization that will change the thinking patterns, habits and business laws of human beings, is considered to trigger a profound change in social development, being positioned as one of the most important national strategies in the future, is the key to the decisive game of the future Big country.

Now, all this is starting to turn into a real gold and silver business. Amazon and Facebook used it to sell more ads; Netflix used it to create the "card House" Marvel, which Zara used to achieve a higher profit margin than LV, which Mr Obama won in the presidential election but was overwhelmed by the prism-gate incident it had made.

Of course, the world has never stopped questioning whether "the opportunities brought by big data have been oversold". In the just-concluded summer Davos, a debate over the theme of "Big data or big flicker" is unusually intense.

A survey of the audience before the debate showed that "big data is the Big Bluff" (the square) slightly prevailed. However, at the end of the debate, "Big data is not a big bluff" (negative) successfully reversed. The opposing "debater" a remark by Professor Sumeng, deputy director of the New Media Marketing Research Center at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, won the vote in the audience's hands: 15 years ago, the Internet was thought to be a bubble, but it proved to be not overvalued, and 5 years ago it was thought that E-commerce was exaggerated, but now it seems to be the wrong conclusion. The development of new things need bubbles, so as to attract more money and talent, precipitation down is really valuable things.

Data Big Bang

You may not necessarily know the following numbers, but you will also feel that the "data" is exploding in geometry, as 1 billion PCs, 4 billion mobile phones, countless internet terminals ... is making the world we live in high-speed digital, "information explosion" has long been from the concept of abstraction into a realistic description.

From the record to the 2003, the total amount of data created by human beings is equal to the amount of data created in the world two days ago, and on such a large basis, the global data volume is still doubled every 18 months; It is expected that global data will reach 44 times times the size of today by 2020. The number of photos uploaded today is equivalent to the sum of all the images taken by Kodak after the invention of the film ...

Just 10 years ago, the 1.44M 3.5-inch plate or we installed the necessary; a few years ago, the size of a small but capacity of hundreds of m of mobile storage has also made people excited; now, the GB-level USB disk and TB-level mobile hard disk has long been ordinary users of the common thing, enterprise-class applications will jump to the PB, EB level. (Editor's note: Data storage units from small to large in order of Byte, KB, MB, GB, TB, PB, EB, ZB, YB, DB, NB, the latter in turn is 1024 times times the former.) ）

Data analysis is not a new concept, and some people would disagree with the big data and think it's just a new bottle of wine. However, the methods and techniques of acquiring, storing, analyzing and interpreting the qualitative change of traditional data have been unable to deal with the current data scale, speed and complexity.

"The big data we're talking about today are quite different from the four aspects of past data mining," he said. "Chinese Academy of Engineering, NI, told China Economic Weekly," first, the data volume is large, often PB level, and the annual increase of 40%~50%; second, the data characteristics of complex, large data era we mainly face unstructured information, such as text, graphics, audio, video and so on, and mostly real-time information Third, the data source is mainly the daily operation of the society and all kinds of services produced in real time, such as online search, social media, mobile phones, e-commerce transactions, remote sensing telemetry data and so on, but the past is mainly business transaction data; Four is the application field is mainly the social science category, for example in the economics and the sociological application, The past is mainly the application of natural science category. ”

The most important driver of the data "big" is cloud computing. Technically, large data is rooted in cloud computing, it is an important extension of cloud computing, the two complement each other. Data has been moved to the "cloud", more easily collected and obtained, the past that the separate storage data often do not have too much value, only different areas to get through sharing, data gold can be present. And such a large number of data can only rely on cloud computing powerful processing capacity, can "Amoy to the golden yellow."

From concept to business

Although in 2012, the big data was gradually accepted and paid attention by Chinese industry, but it is widely believed that 2013 will become China "year of Big Data", the next three years large data market will be an explosive growth trend. Sadie Consultant statistics show that 2012 China's large data market size of 450 million yuan, an increase of 40.6% per cent, and expected by 2016, large data industry will break through tens of billions of dollars.

As ever, the US is still seen as a vane. In fact, big data has become the hottest target for Wall Street and Silicon Valley. In May this year two just listed large data concept stocks tableau and Marketo have been greatly sought after by the market, Tableau first day Rose 63.7%, Raising 254.2 million of billions of dollars to become the IPO of one of the largest tech companies in the U.S. stock market this year, Marketo's share price soared 78% per cent on its debut.

The domestic a-share market also followed the "excitement" for a while, such as the Cupressaceae, the United States and Asia, Huayu software, branch Huaheng, wave information, days, such as technology companies recently strong trend, pulled out a number of trading board.

Currently, there are three main directions for business opportunities in the Big data market: One is to provide "hardware + software + data," The overall solution, which is characterized by platform, providing basic services, the market's main competitors have foreign IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, EMC and so on, the domestic has the dawn, the tide, Huawei, Lenovo and so on.

The second is to master rich data resources of the Internet companies, foreign to Google, Facebook, Amazon as the representative, the domestic Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, such as representatives, these companies to master the vast number of user data, through data mining to form products and services, such as precision marketing and personalized advertising promotion, It also provides "data rental" services that provide decision support to other companies.

"The two directions are not a competitive relationship, but a partnership. Because the two are large data industry chain of different division of labor, the former is responsible for the backend platform, is the system provider, while the latter is responsible for front-end applications. "Shuguang company president Lichun told China Economic Weekly."

Third, there will be a large number of detailed third-party data companies, although they do not have the first type of company's hardware advantages, nor the second type of company's data resource advantages, but with some of the technical advantages and professionalism in the industry chain, but also in the industrial chains to a cup of soup, such as focus on e-government and wisdom of the city's thinking is an example.

I love big data.

Jeff Hammerbach (Jeff hammerbacher), a Harvard math genius, left the Wall Street investment bank Bear steams to join Facebook as the first person to build a data analysis model in 2006. Digging through massive user data, he completed the mission that Facebook's CEO, Zuckerberg, gave him: figuring out the motivations and ways that users clicked on ads, which also opened a lucrative valve for Facebook.

Jeff left Facebook to start his own business in 2008. Speaking of reasons, he said a very famous remark: "The smartest of our generation are thinking about how to get more people to click on ads, which is just awful." "Now Jeff's company is helping doctors find out what common genes the cancer patients have," he said.

Victor Maire Schoenberg, author of the Big Data age, told China Economic Weekly, "Apple godfather Steve Jobs ' cancer was actually very serious, but he lived longer than other cancer people because he had DNA sequencing information that made him a customized, individualized treatment for specialized services.

Indeed, it would be too narrow-minded if we simply understood the value of large data as a more accurate way to push ads to users.

Schoenberg told China Economic Weekly, small to "buy clothes at the most appropriate price and opportunity", big to "How to increase economic efficiency in important economic decisions", big data will tell you how to do.

"With the human brain always like to ask ' why ' compared to the big data will tell you what ' is." Schoenberg for example, in winter, people are always told to remember hats and gloves, otherwise they will catch cold, which is the brain's thinking. But big data analysis will tell you that catching a cold may be a problem with a virus, which is not directly related to wearing gloves and hats. If you go to a restaurant and get sick the next day, the brain's thinking will soon be explained by the reasons why you might eat something bad, but from a statistical point of view, illness may be caused by shaking hands with bacteria. "If you have big data, you can slow your brain down, and you don't have to speculate about why and answer the results directly," he said. ”

Schoenberg Google translation For example: Google relies on the internet to do statistical work, and cost billions of, launched Google translation. "Google doesn't need to know why a word is translated into another word, it only knows what to translate." ”

The penetration of large data is very strong, in essence, all walks of life are already in the data, for example, the telecom industry is becoming the telecommunications data industry, the financial industry into finance data, medical industry has become medical data industry ... This means that large data mining will become a required course in all walks of life.

According to Gartner, the world's most authoritative it research and consulting firm, the 2012 big data led to $28 billion trillion in it spending, which is expected to increase to $34 billion in 2013, and a total of $232 billion trillion in global spending on large data by 2016.

"China's big cities, only the data of health records, there are 5PB in a year, a smart city data a quarter is 200PB, which is hard to imagine in the past." If the data is disorderly, it is rubbish. We need to get this pile of rubbish in order to look for gold. "The army said.

"At the end of 2012, China issued a total of 3.7 billion cards, the world's largest card issuer, about 50 billion ~600 billion transactions per day through 6 million card transactions, this is a very large amount of data." Chaihong, vice president of China UnionPay, told China Economic Weekly that this data is already becoming a very important asset for UnionPay, and that the ability to raise large data processing will be the core competitiveness of UnionPay, or even the nation as a whole.

Wang, general manager of the operation and Security Department of the National Agricultural Credit Bank Fund Clearing Center, told China Economic Weekly: "Ali's microfinance loans are issued in a few hours, and we as a rural financial institution with full support for small micro-enterprises and personal financial services, the fastest 7-10 days." What are they on? Is the advantage of using open platform channel, and one is the competition of data mining. They have greatly reduced the cost and efficiency of such credit and letter-raising. Our banks have no shortage of data, but they lack the commercial value of turning the data into wisdom and not fully exploiting the data. ”

"10 years ago, we are only food and clothing society, but today has stepped into a well-off society, the future of big data will have what kind of development, may break through our imagination." For example, the current development of mobile payment, we need and operators of data cooperation to provide users with better service. In the future, health care, education and pension services are likely to be upgraded and improved by large data. "Chaihong said.

The worries of the carnival

This June, 30-year-old Snowden (Edward Snowden), a man who almost stirred the world, the U.S. defense contractor employees, former CIA agents because of exposure to the United States "PRISM" program and become the focus of the global media. It turns out that the National Security Agency has been monitoring the mainland and Hong Kong since 2009, through direct access to the central servers of nine big internet companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, to get a large number of users ' emails, chats, videos and login information.

Although the U.S. government says there have been "dozens of" possible terrorist attacks aborted by the prism, it has sparked a global debate: where is the delicate frontier of national security and personal privacy? And this year's "3 15", CCTV and other media for many internet companies through the cookies "steal" user information of the behavior of the exposure, but also triggered large data collection and sharing and personal privacy protection debate. Many in the industry are worried that this will become a huge obstacle to the development of the big data industry.

After all, big data is emerging, and relevant policies and regulations even in the United States is far from perfect gap. NI that: "China's large data industry is also facing the lack of talent, the degree of Open data is low, the relevant laws and regulations are not perfect." ”

"Big data can be big opportunities, big development, big innovation, and maybe a big crisis, a big break, a big elimination," he said. Cloud computing and big data are destined to bring about a revolution. "The army said.

Just like in the movie "Penalty Gold", the biggest difficulty for the general manager of the baseball team, who wants to replace the experience of thinking through data, is not the technical difficulties of data analysis and the investment of money, but the disagree of the whole team, because the experienced coach and the scout who think that the eye knows bead Do not think that a mathematical genius can use computers to replace their years of cultivation experience and intuition. The same is true in our government decisions and business judgments, and the ability to change ideas is the key to the effectiveness of large data.

"If a company has data, but no data of the culture, it is difficult to carry out so that more people use data, so big data is actually an attitude." Cheping, the first chairman of the Alibaba Group's data commission, told China Economic Weekly.

Currently in China, "big data" has not been directly referred to by the state as a proper noun. However, the Ministry of Industry and Information technology released the "Twelve-Five" planning, the information processing technologies as one of the four key technological innovation projects, including mass data storage, data mining, image and video intelligent analysis, which are "large data" is an important part. However, there are already institutional initiatives to increase the size of large data as a national strategy, as in the United States.

"China's cloud computing and large data industry is the industry most likely to overtake corners in the domestic information industry, our data resources are extremely rich, technical research on we have achieved close to the international forefront, there are some enterprises in China to seize this opportunity to expand their business, to transform, I hope they can achieve leapfrog development. Ni said, but he also said that the biggest bottleneck is "application lag", but he believes that the development prospects will be very broad.