Navigating the Hyper-Connected Economy with Altern
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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 approaches 2^50 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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