This week’s Twitter Round-Up showcases new ways to think about data. I didn’t go looking for tweets in that vein. They arose organically, and I saw the correlation. Perhaps I picked them because of my subconscious focus on these topics this week, or maybe it’s simply the thread that happens to run between them.
But the data isn’t the point—the decisions someone makes based off of it is what matters. As you’ll see in some of these, data is never the point. Data is the building block of a larger insight and the resulting action.
With that, I give you this week’s Twitter Round-Up:
Price of digital storage
Price of 1 gb of storage over time: 1981 $300000 1987 $50000 1990 $10000 1994 $1000 1997 $100 2000 $10 2004 $1 2012 $0.10
— Science Facts (@Science_Factoid) April 14, 2014
While some might see this as a bit of a rip off when it comes to buying a flash drive, I say it’s proof that technology is a very limited differentiator. What else are you doing to provide value to your business or your customers? If you’re basing your value just on unique tech, think again—you might end up at the $.10 level before you know it.
Big data in the real world
Your Big Data Is Worthless if You Don’t Bring It Into the Real World #bigdata http://t.co/NdrVr7nFcq
— Bryan Eisenberg (@TheGrok) April 11, 2014
This Wired.com article touches on a topic that I’ve been focused in on for a while (look for an upcoming blog post): data itself is only a representation of something bigger. That “something” is whatever microcosm of society you want to section out and study. Data is its shadow—to focus too much on the shadow is to forget who is casting it, and that will lead a brand to stumble big time.
Catch and release…the sun?
! MT @amcafee @MIT+@Harvard team figures out how to store solar energy, then release heat when the sun isn’t shining. http://t.co/NwvTN8e5qx
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) April 15, 2014
Well this is interesting—a Harvard team is finding out how to harness the power of the sun, even when it’s not shining. What does this have to do with data, you ask? Either I could say that the data they gathered was critical to their work, or I could say that it’s just really cool. I’ll stick with the latter.
Google: the world’s largest “Help Wanted” board
60% of job searches start on Google. Are your job postings SEO optimized? http://t.co/jmBtIcHeAx
— Jerome Ternynck (@jerometernynck) April 11, 2014
Here’s what interests me about this tweet: @jerometernynck juxtaposes a stat (“60% of job searches”) with a location (Google) and a follow-up question (SEO on job postings). That’s not a simple analysis that you’re going to get straight out of Google Analytics—but it is exactly how we think. If Jerome had stopped with the 60%, we would barely have noticed. But when he asks a critical follow-up question, that’s when it hits you: “I don’t know the answer. But now I really, really want to.” That, my friends, is what it means to get an insight.