Taming The Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics

CHAPTER 3

A Cross-Section of Big Data Sources and the Value They Hold

Wouldn’t it be neat to receive an offer on your mobile phone for a discounted meal at a restaurant as you are driving past its parking lot? How happy would you be if a pit boss at a casino gave you the $20 that a dealer forgot to pay you? Imagine being able to quickly find people who match to your playing style in an online video game because the game can tell you who they are. Would you like to lower your car insurance rates? All of these are possible through big data.

In Chapter 2 we discussed web data. If web data isn’t the original big data, it is probably the most widely used and recognized source of big data. But there are many other sources of big data as well, and they all have their own valuable uses. Some are fairly well-known and some are relatively obscure. In this chapter, we’re going to take a look at nine more sources of big data and some ways to use them. Each will be covered at a high level. The purpose is to provide an introduction to what each data source is about and then review some of the appli­cations and implications that each data source has for businesses.

Chapters 2 and 3 are not a top-10 list, because the claim is not that these are the most important sources of big data. The order in which the sources are discussed doesn’t imply any ranking either. The point is to provide a representative cross-section of big data sources so that the reader will understand the breadth and types of ...