Most of us own a phone and a laptop, which we use daily, and when we use these devices, they produce large chunks of data from different activities like texts, documents, music, surfing the internet, etc.
Smartphone users produce approximately 40 exabytes of data every month from their phones. Recently, social media has been a significant generator of data with the introduction of stories and reels.
On Snapchat alone, 2.1 million snaps are shared every minute, approximately 4.5 million videos are watched on YouTube per minute, and over 188 million emails are sent per minute. That is a lot of content being streamed across different platforms. Have you ever wondered where this amount of data is processed and stored? That is where big data comes into play.
“Big data” are large volumes of accurate and valuable data which are generated at a very high speed. Big data is stored in the cloud, as conventional computer systems cannot house it. This data is not a liability but an essential tool used to create better services for users across different platforms. Some of these real-life examples are:
Transportation
In the transportation sector, big data streamlines traffic using GPS systems to predict and suggest individual routes to avoid traffic on a particular road when the other paths are less busy.
Healthcare
Hospitals and clinics around the world produce over 3,000 exabytes of data every year in the form of patient records and test results. These data are stored and processed to enable faster disease detection and better treatment at reduced costs.
Online platforms
Most online platforms, such as social media platforms and search engines, use big data to understand each of their customers differently by knowing the kind of content they are interested in; that way, they can recommend such content to them and are bound to acquire engagement from such practices.
Sports
Players’ analytics are taken per game using big data to help coaches and players understand their strengths and improve on their weaknesses. Fans and sports professionals also take polls to vote for players of the match and other sports award categories.
Advertising
Advertising is another sector in which big data has grown to have a tremendous effect. Data and analytics gathered from different individuals are used to make both online and offline ads more relevant and help them reach the target audience that needs such products and services.
Gaming
Developers of gaming platforms use their users’ data to create the gaming environment and avatars so that they will be more suited, friendly, and fun to use.
These are just some of how big data has helped revolutionize different industries in the world today, and it is only getting better as more industries adopt it to make their work easier. As you now understand what big data is, which other sectors do you recognize that use big data?
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