Big Data Bytes: What the Cheerleaders Say

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky at the Engaging Data 2013 Conference

“We can find lots of data; the problem is understanding it. And a lot of data around us go through a filter so it doesn’t reach us”–Noam Chomsky

“The reason we’re all talking about big data is because some analysts made all the money they could off of cloud, and they had to move on to the next buzzword. It was data warehousing, and then software as a service, and then cloud computing, and everyone put their money into cloud startups until it was time to change the topic”–Jim Goodnight, CEO, SAS

“Big Data is bullshit… The ‘big’ there is purely marketing. This is all fear… This is about you buying big expensive servers and whatnot”—Harper Reed, chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign

“One great and underused technique at this scale is sampling.  For most things that you want to do with data, 100,000 randomly selected rows is as good as 10,000,000 rows and working at R or SPSS scale allows for a much faster analysis cycle–Lukas Biewald, CEO of the startup Crowdflower

About GilPress

I'm Managing Partner at gPress, a marketing, publishing, research and education consultancy. Also a Senior Contributor forbes.com/sites/gilpress/. Previously, I held senior marketing and research management positions at NORC, DEC and EMC. Most recently, I was Senior Director, Thought Leadership Marketing at EMC, where I launched the Big Data conversation with the “How Much Information?” study (2000 with UC Berkeley) and the Digital Universe study (2007 with IDC). Twitter: @GilPress
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