 women with high potential pregnancy scores. The coupons are a reminder that Target has what pregnant women need at each stage of their pregnancy and when they became mothers.
In order to avoid the charge that Target was spying or invading their privacy, the newborn-related coupons were mixed with neutral discounts.
As The New York Times Magazine reported, in 2010 Target’s Mom and Baby sales increased dramatically and Pole was promoted.
How Big is Big?
Like maternity sweatpants, digital data are produced in a variety of sizes—small, medium, large, XL and Big. Knowing the digital data prefixes is an integral part of Informatics 101.
• Kilobytes: This article contains approximately 40 kilobytes of information. A kilobyte is 1,000 bytes and this article is 40 times that figure. A byte represents one character such as a single letter in this sentence.
• Megabytes: A good high resolution digital photograph suitable for framing at a large size would ordinarily contain one megabyte or more of data. That’s one million bytes.
• Gigabytes: Seven minutes of high definition television? That’s a gigabyte or one billion bytes.
• Terabytes: The total Internet traffic for the first quarter of 1993 was a terabyte or one trillion bytes. Today, the amount of Internet data used in one second exceeds four terabytes. In a 2011 report on big data, McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2009, nearly all sectors in the United States economy with 1,000 or more employees had, on average, 200 terabytes of stored data.
• Petabytes: A petabyte or 1,000 terabytes is what Google all by itself processes each hour.
• Exabytes: This year, one exabyte of digital data or one million terabytes is created every 9.6 hours by the vast worldwide array of electronic devices.
• Others: There are further extensions such as zettabytes and yottabytes all useful and mind boggling descriptors quantifying the enormity of big data.
Despite the ease of finding everyday examples of terabytes, petabytes and exabytes, these large datasets are beyond the ability of ordinary software to capture, store, manage and analyze.
McKinsey Global Institute states flatly, “We are generating so much data today that it is physically impossible to store it all.” These facts of digital life today make the old maxim, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” even more difficult to put into practice. New tools, new software and especially new skills are needed to mine, manage and salvage big data.
Big Data in the Classroom
Charlotte’s leader in big data education is Dr. Yi (pronounced Yee) Deng. He is dean and professor of the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. Deng and his 60 plus faculty members oversee the education of 1,400 computing and informatics majors and grad students, the next generation of technologists and big data miners.
“Every day we generate nine times as much information as in all of the libraries in the United States combined,” says Deng. “Ninety percent of the world’s data have been generated in the last two years.” That’s information from cell phones, iPads, wireless devices, emails and computers plus old fashioned information in the form of reports, messages, television, radio and books. To further drive home the point, Deng adds that this massive data avalanche doubles every two years.
In May, Deng and his associates hosted a major big data conference at the Ritz Carlton. Charlotte Informatics 2012: Competing + Winning through Analytics attracted over 300 local and regional business leaders. The conference panelists discussed Informatics as it refers to big data, analytics, visualization and a host of other IT-related terms that describe the collection and analysis of data in new ways to drive strategic business insights.
Deng emphasizes that Informatics is one of the most important areas of study emerging today. Then he adds a wakeup call: “Companies that employ informatics in the strategy and management of their businesses are outgrowing and outperforming their competitors.”
To drive home the point, Deng cites a b