Top Highlights

• data became a raw material of business, a vital economic input, used to create a new form of economic value.
• Like so many new technologies, big data will be a victim of Silicon Valley’s notorious hype cycle: after being feted on the cover of magazines and at industry conferences, the trend will be dismissed and many of the data-smitten startups will flounder.
• Instead, it is built on “big data”—the ability of society to harness information in novel ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value.
• In 2012 it identified a sudden surge in flu cases, but overstated the amount, perhaps because of a barrage of media attention about the flu. Yet what is clear is that the next time a pandemic comes around, the world will have a better tool at its disposal to predict and thus prevent its spread.
• The amount of computing power and storage he needed was too expensive. But although changes in technology have been a critical factor making it possible, something more important changed too, something subtle. There was a shift in mindset about how data could be used.