Connect with us

Technology

Order From Chaos: How Big Data Will Change the World

Published

on

Order from Chaos- Big Data

Order From Chaos: How Big Data Will Change the World

Harnessing the exponential surge in data creates big opportunities.

Thanks to Purefunds Big Data ETF (BDAT) for helping us put this together.

IBM estimates that each day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created or replicated. That’s the equivalent of a million hard drives filling up with data every hour.

The current volume of data created is substantial: it is so much that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years. However, the amount of information today pales in comparison to what our future holds, as the rate at which data is created is accelerating exponentially.

It’s for this reason that The Economist estimates that there will be roughly 7x more data in 2020 than there was in 2014.

Where Does Big Data Come From?

Big data comes from both internal and external sources. Internally, millions of old documents and records are scanned and archived by businesses. Most of the time, no detailed analytics have ever been run on this information. Externally, the public web offers millions of data sets published for public consumption by government, economic, census, and other sources.

There’s also a broad spectrum of data that exists that can be a part of both of these categories: social media posts, documents, emails, business applications, machine log data, media, and sensor data can all be collected, processed, and analyzed. To get a sense of the extent of this information, here’s what is created every hour just from social media and email: 72 hours of video uploaded to Youtube, 4 million search inquiries on Google, 200 million emails sent, 2.5 million shares on Facebook, and 300,000 tweets made.

Big Data = Big Opportunities for Business

With proper analysis, Big Data can lead to new understandings of consumer behaviour, better management decisions, new innovations, and improved risk management. However, there are big challenges in making use of so much information.

  • Too much data creates an information overload.
  • Organizing and storing all of this data can be problematic.
  • Companies don’t know how to use all of this data to create insight.

To organize and make sense of it all, data scientists use the three V’s to describe Big Data.

Volume is the scale at which data is created, and includes the massive amounts of information derived from phones, internet users, machine logs, and internet of things.

Velocity is the analysis of streaming data: for example, modern cars have 100 sensors that monitor different systems in real-time.

Variety is the different forms of data, and it reflects the fact that data comes in all shapes and forms. Finding a way to harmonize multiple types of data can be quite a challenge. Research finds that organizations spend up to 80% of their time modelling and preparing data, rather than actually gaining insight.

Let’s see how companies have been able to use Big Data to create opportunity.

Case Studies of Big Data

Macy’s adjusts pricing in near-real time for 73 million items based on demand and inventory.

American Express developed predictive models that analyze historical transactions and 115 variables to forecast the loyalty of customers. Using this data, they can see if customers may be potentially closing their accounts in the near future. Launching a pilot program in Australia, the company can now identify 24% of accounts in the country that will close in the next four months.

Walmart built a new search engine for their website that includes semantic data relying on text analysis, machine learning, and even synonym mining to create better search results. Online shoppers have been more likely to complete purchases as a result by 10% to 15%, increasing revenue by billions.

Los Angeles and Santa Cruz police departments have used an algorithm that is typically used to predict earthquakes, now using it to look at crime data. The software can predict where crimes are likely to occur down to 500 square feet. In areas the software is being used, there has been a 33% reduction in burglaries and a 21% reduction in violent crimes.

Big Market

Today’s data centers occupy the land to equivalent to almost 6,000 football fields. By 2020, the amount of digital information is expected to increase exponentially to more than 7x of what it is today.

In healthcare alone, Big Data is expected to eventually save $300 billion per year in healthcare analytics. Retailers may increase margins up to 60% through Big Data analytics.

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combusion engine.” – Peter Sondergaard, Gartner Research.

Click for Comments

Technology

Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues

Dive into the GTA budget through the years, with GTA VI set to be the most expensive video game of all time.

Published

on

A cropped chart comparing the GTA budget and revenue across three game titles.

Charting Grand Theft Auto: GTA’s Budget and Revenues

Over 10 years since the launch of Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V), the second most-sold video game in history, Rockstar Games has announced its sequel GTA VI will be “coming 2025.”

As the anticipation only grows for this next big entry in the franchise, we take a look at the GTA budget through the years. How much have the last two games cost to make, how much have they earned, and how do they compare with the latest entry?

Data for this visualization comes from Statista, TweakTown, and Twitch Metrics.

How Much Has GTA VI Cost to Make?

The GTA franchise has grown enormously in scale from humble beginnings as a top-down, 2D video game in 1997. Fifteen installments later, the upcoming release, GTA VI, is estimated to be the most expensive video game to be made yet.

Here’s a look at how much GTA VI and the last two major releases cost, and how much revenue they’ve earned as of August 2023.

YearTitleProduction Costs ($)Revenue ($)Copies Sold
2025 (est.)GTA VI$2B (rumored)N/AN/A
2013GTA V $265M$7.7B185M
2008GTA IV$100M$2B25M

In 2008, GTA IV cost around $100 million—already a budget that rivalled big Hollywood releases. However with 25 million copies sold, the game earned nearly $2 billion—a five-fold return on its production cost.

Five years later, GTA V (2013) cost more than $200 million to make—twice GTA IV’s budget. A decade after its release, GTA V has generated close to $8 billion, with hundreds of millions in annual revenue from subscriptions and in-game purchases—a model that its successor is sure to follow.

In fact, subscription fees and in-game purchases represented 78% of Take-Two Interactive’s (parent of GTA developer Rockstar Games) revenues in 2023.

Analysts estimate the to-be-released GTA VI’s costs at $2 billion, including marketing and other expenses. A massive open-world (set in the Miami-inspired “Vice City”), cutting edge graphics, and a reportedly brand-new game engine are all reasons for the game’s outsized budget.

For comparison, the current most expensive games to have been made include Red Dead Redemption 2 (also by Rockstar) and Star Citizen, both reportedly with a $500 million budget.

Meanwhile, Take-Two Interactive shares are up more than 50% for the year.

Continue Reading

Subscribe

Popular