With technology advancing so quickly, the use of Data is increasing and becoming more usefull. Data is used in a variety of ways that couldnt have been possible years ago, organisations like Wallmart collect and analyze big data on customer transactions. it is estimated that they collect 2.5 Petabytes every hour from customer transactions, enough to fill 20 million filing cabinets of text. This data would have been near impossible to analyze 30 years ago, but now this information can be taken straight from a digital database and put into tables and graphs, allowing busisesses like wallmart to quickly spot trends in consumer spending (McAfee, A., & Brynjolfsson, E., 2012).

Another example of companies using big data is the example of Passur Airlines (McAfee, A., & Brynjolfsson, E., 2012) who noticed that airline ETA’s were not as accurate as they could be and were costing arilines millions in dellayed flights and un-predictable flight shcedules. by combining a range of publicly sourced data such as weather and how busy the airport is, as well as information they were able to source through there own planes real-world arival and departure times, they were able to create a much more accurate flight estimates. As the program went on, Passur airlines began to gather the data to forecast future flights and also allow themselves to check what happened in similar, previous situations when looking at flight times.

This build up of Data allows marketers to gather data on you and market products more specifically to the customers needs. Businesses like Amazon and google have been doing this for years and it allows Amazon to recomend products to you with a high degree of accuracy, google to charge more for there heavily tailored ad service, which knows more about you that most people would probabally imagine through the use of their mobile opperating system which constsantly knows where you are, to their search engine which knows exactly what you are looking for. The Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, has already come out in saying that they plan to be able to know exactly what their users want yo watch, before they even click it, creating a constantly streaming service of videos, specifically tailord to the user (Aultta, 2014). It is easy to see how powerfull big data can be, especially now that organizations are easily and quickly able to analyze this.

Ken Aultta, (2014).  The New yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/03/outside-the-box-2. Feb 2012, Accessed: 16th October 2014

McAfee, A., & Brynjolfsson, E. (2012). Big data: the management revolution. Harvard business review, 90(10), 60-66.