Reliance Infotel is looking at creating a mega-server of broadband content for his 4G customers.
Network 18-Eenadu is just the beginning of a bigger data and video strategy. The primetime newsmaker will now become the creator of news himself.
After months of speculation and closed-door dialogues, Mukesh Ambani is finally making a big-bang diversification into media via a complicated series of transactions that will eventually see his flagship Reliance Industries control a significant chunk of two of the leading media houses in the country - the Raghav Bahl-promoted Network 18 Group and the Eenadu Group, run by Hyderabad based Ramoji Rao.
What is the value of a tweet? How much does Yelp value a review? As a participant in the social media economy, how much value does your participation create for companies like Facebook and LinkedIn?
These questions came to mind recently as we had a deep discussion at Backupify about the value of data in the cloud. Sometimes people ask me why they should backup their cloud data. The answer that I give comes from asking thousands of Backupify customers why they do it – because the data is valuable, and it is always important to protect valuable assets.
Quantifying the value of data to a business is relatively easy. For customers who use our Backup for Google Apps or Backup for Salesforce products to protect their corporate data, it boils down to three basic concerns:
How difficult it would be to recreate that data
How much revenue would be lost if the data was lost
How much productivity would be lost if important data could not be accessed
The value of social data (for both consumers and businesses) is a little bit harder to quantify. We decided to take a shot at it by building off some publicly available information to figure out what social data, which social media companies, and what social media actions are the most valuable. The results are in posted in the Backupify Social Data Value Infographic below.
We plotted the data in two different ways. The first is by average per-user value, which of course has Facebook as king of the hill. The second plot shows how many users a service would require to reach a $10 billion valuation. As you can see, most of the companies are unlikely to ever get that big.
So take a look, and let us know what you think. Are Yelp reviews really worth more than tweets? Who should we have put on the graph that didn’t make it? Which pieces of social media are over or under valued? Leave a comment, write a post, or just tweet @backupify with your thoughts.
The proliferation of data has always been part of the impact of information and communications technology. Now, as computers and cell phones continue to pervade our daily activities and as millions of networked sensors are being embedded in these devices (as well as in automobiles, “smart” meters, and other machines), the amount of data available for analysis is exploding. The scale and scope of the changes that such “big data” are bringing about have reached an inflection point. Companies capture trillions of bytes of information about customers, suppliers, and operations. Many citizens look with suspicion at the amount of data collected on every aspect of their lives. Can big data play a useful role?
New research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that collecting, storing, and mining big data for insights can create significant value for the world economy, enhancing the productivity and competitiveness of companies and the public sector and creating a substantial economic surplus for consumers. The report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity explores the state of digital data, how different domains can use large data sets to create value, and the implications for the leaders of private-sector companies and public-sector organizations, as well as for policy makers. The report’s analysis is supplemented by a detailed examination of five domains—health care, retailing, the public sector, manufacturing, and personal-location data.
MGI’s analysis shows that companies and policy makers must tackle significant hurdles to fully capture big data’s potential. The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical and managerial expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the study of big data (exhibit). Companies and policy makers must also tackle misaligned incentives around issues such as privacy and security, access to data, and technology deployment.
The report identified five broadly applicable ways to leverage big data:
Make big data more accessible and timely. Transparency, enabled by big data, can unlock a great deal of value. In the public sector, increasing access to data across separate departments can sharply reduce search and processing times. In manufacturing, integrating data from R&D, engineering, and manufacturing units to facilitate concurrent engineering can cut time to market.
Use data and experiments to expose variability and raise performance. As organizations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days.
Segment populations to customize. Big data allow organizations to create ever-narrowing segmentations and to tailor services precisely to meet customer needs. This approach is well known in marketing and risk management but can be revolutionary in areas such as the public sector.
Use automated algorithms to replace and support human decision making. Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Such analytics have applications from tax agencies to retailers.
Innovate with new business models, products, and services. To improve the development of next-generation offerings and to create innovative after-sales services, manufacturers are leveraging data obtained from the use of products. The emergence of real-time location data has created a new set of location-based mobile services from navigation to people tracking.
Interested in big data? Use the #McKBigData and #BigData hashtags to follow the conversation on Twitter. We’ll be responding to your comments via our McKinsey Quarterly Twitter account,@McKQuarterly.
