A Review of Internet Technology Part 6: Data

Over the past 10 years three things are very evident with data.  It has become much more available, there are heaps more of it, and it is being stored in the cloud.  The web would be nothing without data to populate it.  There is no point in having services and devices communicate with each other if the services have nothing to share.

Google has put the internet at our fingertips.  The search engine giant is literally changing the way our brains remember things.  Any question you can think of you can probably type it into google and someone has asked it before.  Wikipedia is another great example.  It draws upon the knowledge of the entire word to populate the most popular encyclopedia that has ever existed.

All of this new web data is being stored in the cloud meaning it can be accessed from any device with an internet connection.

Real time monitoring of data is also a growing trend.  Google Analytics just released an update that allows you to see visits and monitor visitors as they browse your website through the control panel.  How amazing is that?  So much data is being captured and the real problem has become how to make the knowledge meaningful.

Energy Informatics is a good example of turning typically useless data into meaningful knowledge that helps reduce our carbon footprint and save money.  Let's say for example you had a meter on each electrical outlet that collects data every 30 seconds of how much power it has used the past 30 seconds.  Just looking at the data overview you would not see any trends or have any valuable information.  It is only when you use a statistical program such as R or even excel or a web application to create an analysis of the data are we able to create value.  You can begin to see where the most energy is being used by which appliances and will likely turn them off more often once you see how much energy they are actually using.

Google meter was a short lived initiative started by google.  It allowed homeowners to wirelessly monitor their electric meters from a website in real time.  Participants in google meter ended up using 10% less electricity on average after starting the program.  The data was always there for the participants but google meter made it much more available to them by providing a history of all of the meter reads and making it so they could access it from anywhere.