Filtering the digital exhaust

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:25:25 +0000

If 80 percent of new data created is going to be unstructured, where is all that data coming from? It’s coming from consumers’ activities online and it requires real-time processing, said Continuuity’s Todd Papaionnou at Structure:Data on Wednesday.

Papaionnou calls this unstructured data “digital exhaust,” everything consumers do on a daily basis — clicks, tweets, searches, Facebook posts. Companies can use it to offer more customized experiences for consumers online – content and deal targeting, advertising and sentiment analysis — but they have to process it first.

“Who cares if you’re able to get data signals if you can’t act on it?” Papaiaonnou said, noting Hadoop isn’t real time. “To get to real time you have to take the human out of the equation and [start] allowing machines to make these decisions.” He pointed to initiatives like Yahoo’s S4 and Twitter’s Storm as ones to watch.

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Filtering the digital exhaust