Happy Birthday, Internet! And my, how creative we can get with all the data you have.
The internet is over 30 years old this year. To celebrate this, I could’ve reminisced about the sound of the first ever modems connecting with their weird sounds, my first Geocities blog, ICQ crush, surfing the web for the first time on an LCD-screened Nokia (pre-iPhone era), but I choose not to.
Instead I’ve decided to write about data. All the data this thirty-year-old has generated. I agree, data, on a spreadsheet, can look really boring. But when you use it to discover patterns, or inform an idea, data gets interesting. More about that in a bit.
First, I want to impress on you that the amount of data you generate daily — it might surprise you.
- You wake up, and send a text to your partner who’s beside in bed, less than two feet away from you (conversation data).
- Groggily you exit your flat, walk to your Tube station and take the dark green line (GPS data).
- On the way to the office, you resist the urge to buy overpriced coffee from Starbucks. You fail and buy an ultra-large toffee nut latte (financial data).
- At work, you don’t work. Instead you spend five hours looking online for a new winter jacket (activity data); you’re just window shopping or scrolling, rather.
- After work, you head to the pub for a Brewdog (financial data).
- You take silly photos of your crew at the pub and share them on Instagram (photo and video data)
- You jog home in your stupor to “stay healthy”, plus also because you need to justify your recent Fitbit purchase anyway (GPS and activity data).
- You watch Netflix (activity data).
- You Netflix and chill (…data).
Collectively, all the humans on the planet with an internet connection — about 4.4 billion of us, created about 2.5 exabytes (EB) of data per day in 2018. Doesn’t sound like much. Until it works out that 2.5 EB = 2.5 BILLION GIGABYTES PER DAY.
What’s more, it’s estimated that there’ll be about 75 billion Internet-of-Things things by 2020. This will explode the amount of data generated every day even more. Plus, about a million of first-time users are added to the wonderful world of the WWW every day. Crazy times. Or crazy times many, many zeroes.
The weird thing here is not that there’s so much data sitting in servers. It’s that so little being done with it. In fact, less than 0.5% of all the data out there is being analysed. Opportunity time!
Can we use the mountains of data our clients have on a digital spreadsheet somewhere in a virtual drawer to inform or inspire cool ideas? Yeah. Here are some examples:
The Sound of Honda — Ayrton Senna 1989
Telemetry data collected during Ayrton Senna’s record-setting F1 Lap at Japan’s Suzuka Circuit in 1989 was turned into an emotional film. Titanium Grand Prix winner. Old, but still amazing to watch.
No Need to Fly by Deutsche Bahn
German rail trawled Facebook to target users interested in an overseas destination, grabbed their location (also FB data) to work out how much it’ll cost them to fly from where they are to where they’re interested to go. All this is done behind the scenes. What the user sees is a sponsored post with a lookalike German destination.
Alert Shirt by Foxtel
Australian Football League were given a jersey with embedded electronics, which turned real-time data gathered during a game into haptic sensations, mimicking feelings of pressure, impact, adrenaline and exhaustion.
House of Clicks by Hemnet
The Swedish property portal took data from 200 million clicks on 86,000 properties on the Hemnet site and turned it into a 3D mock-up of Sweden’s ‘most sought-after home’.
Green Light Run by Adidas
With 15,772 traffic lights, more than New York or London, it’s impossible to complete an uninterrupted urban run much less a marathon. To launch a new concept store, Adidas created an application that let a group of users run 42 kilometres uninterrupted through the city using live traffic data.
I end with a link to the first website in the world http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. It’s prolly storing your click-thru data somewhere.
