According to a recent report from the Economist Intelligence
Unit (EIU) titled ‘The Hyperconnected Economy: How the growing
Interconnectedness of Society is changing the Landscape for Business’
(http://dtn.fm/W4z9k), ‘more than a technological trend, hyperconnectivity is a
cultural condition to which businesses have no choice but to adapt.’ The report
goes on to explain that ‘hyperconnectivity is a term that describes a defining
feature of contemporary society. Thanks to the Internet, mobile technology and
soon the Internet of things, people, places, organizations and objects are
linked together like never before.’ In other words, developments in technology
have shrunk the world. However, while the technology has drawn us closer, it
has also multiplied the complexity of our lives. The same applies to business.
As the EIU report hints, the increased connectivity presents new challenges and
opportunities for businesses. The launch of Alternet Systems, Inc.’s (OTC:
ALYI) Data Analytics Division in January 2016 is, thus, timely, as it offers
businesses the tools to navigate the new landscape of this virtual world.
The seminal event of this brave new virtual world was, of
course, the introduction of packet switching technology. It was used at first
in the U.S. Department of Defense’s ARPANET and is now widely employed in the
super network known as the internet. Now the internet has over one billion
websites, and sites are added at the rate of two or three every second. Now
also, according to a press release (http://dtn.fm/d9thU) issued by the
International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations (UN),
around 3.2 billion people globally are using the internet. ‘Between 2000 and
2015, Internet penetration has increased almost seven-fold from 6.5 to 43 per
cent of the global population’ and ‘the proportion of households with Internet
access at home advanced from 18 per cent in 2005 to 46 per cent in 2015.’ It’s
not just people, of course. Much of the internet is automated with computers
‘speaking’ to computers and other ‘smart’ devices in the internet of things (IoT).
Many of the largest companies in the world are already
grappling with ways to tackle this enormous amorphous mass of data, referred to
as ‘big data’. Big data is big and growing. The term ‘googol’ may have
connotations of gargantuan but the size of the Google index pales in comparison
to the petabytes of data still waiting to be cataloged. One petabyte equals 250
bytes. It has been reported in ‘How Much of the Internet is Hidden’
(http://dtn.fm/7PqmI) that ‘Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, estimated that
it (the internet) consists of roughly five million terabytes of data. That’s
over five trillion megabytes. Google’s web search has indexed about 200
terabytes of this data. That’s a lot of data, but that comprises only 0.004
percent of the whole thing.’ The term big data is no exaggeration.
Since the volume of data available is so immense, it is very
likely that organizations will require specialized third-parties, like Alternet
Systems, to not only provide the analytics tools but also the strategies needed
to take advantage of the internet’s hidden treasures. Size is not the only
defining critical factor of big data, which is structured in a variety of
formats from a diversity of sources: ecommerce transactions, financial
transactions, social media interactions, web logs, etc.
The EIU report continues with the observation that ‘one of
the important outcomes of hyper-connectivity for business is the creation of
new fields of competition. Data are being developed within companies, from
public sources, by third-party vendors that provide multiple linkages on
products, pricing, branding and sales. From proactive pricing to tracking the
branding of competitors’ products, hyper-connected data present a new basis for
competition.’
With an International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast that
the ‘big data technology and services market will grow at 26.4% compound annual
growth rate to $41.5 billion through 2018’, Alternet Systems aims to be, in the
coming months, one of those third-party vendors.
For more information, visit www.alternetsystems.com
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