Most everyone knows that a bad experience is more likely to be shared than a good one. For some reason, people are much more inclined to rant than they are to rave. Even writers have an easier time writing a bad review than a good one. In the end, everyone just wants to be a critic. Because of this little human idiosyncrasy, business owners are uber sensitive to the wants and needs of their customers and clients. And they should... Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in big data
Most everyone knows that a bad experience is more likely to be shared than a good one. For some reason, people are much more inclined to rant than they are to rave. Even writers have an easier time writing a bad review than a good one. In the end, everyone just wants to be a critic. Because of this little human idiosyncrasy, business owners are uber sensitive to the wants and needs of their customers and clients. And they should... 
“The cultural and organizational implications are huge. Relationships must be fully reciprocal and once that relationship is established, companies of all sizes need to be prepared to act based on the influence of the customer. In this way, organizations are shifting from being merely customer-centric to customer-activated.” This was just part of the message shared from the editors at IBM in regard to a recent study, which focused on midmarket companies and their intent on developing a digital strategy. The... 
In December of last year, the retail team at Alix Partners, a global firm of senior business and consulting professionals, summarized the 2012 holiday shopping season as less than what retailers were looking for. In the same report, they delivered their annual predictions for 2013, which included topics ranging from the Internet sales tax issue to omni-channel selling. Nearly six months later, as retailers head into the 2013 holiday shopping season, Alix Partners revisited those earlier predictions to determine their... Information overload. The phrase barely scratches the surface when it comes to the mass quantities of data available for gathering. Take the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for example. In 2000, when the star survey project first took off, the New Mexico telescope had collected more data in its first few weeks than had ever been collected in the history of astronomy. Since that time, it has accumulated more than 140 terabytes of information.
And if that’s not enough to blow your mind, according to the Economist, Chili’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is predicted to draw in that much data every five days. But it’s not just the great expanse that holds an infinite amount of information. Even the retail world has mind-boggling amounts of data to collect.
“Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America's Library of Congress,” reports the Economist.
Regardless of the size of the business or the amount of information it takes in, it’s essential for retailers to remember that collecting the data is just the beginning of the process. It becomes big data when each piece of information is analyzed, sized up and put into context.
In the video above, IBM expert Jeff Jonas explains why data matters. What it equates to for retailers is that when individual transactions (individual pieces of data) are placed into the bigger picture, so much can be learned about consumers and their shopping habits.