by I’m not exactly jumping out on a limb here! Let’s put a little description on smartness. In my talk, I suggested “broadband a “Table Stake.” Having a strong broadband foundation is a backbone to preparing for the economy of the future. In other words, if you want to develop your economic region, one easy thing in your control is to make a strong commitment to building, maintaining, and connecting the region to highest-speed broadband.
So, that’s the opening “bet” that enables one to play, next is exploring the opportunities that might be offered by Big Data and the Cloud. To put it in context, social media has pretty much mainstreamed as the last big thing. Moving on….Big data is capturing analyzing and applying massive data sets to make better decisions, and the tools for that are upon us. Massive, massive, massive! And this makes storage and access an issue – thus, the cloud. The cloud is an approach to storing this massive amount of data. It’s in the network instead of the hard drive. In simple terms instead of buying a song and putting it on our hard drive, we stream it from a server and don’t actually possess it. Some trust and comfort issues, but we’ll likely work through them.
So what’s that mean? We’re moving to what are called “predictive analytics,” using that data to help us anticipate what’s next. Recently, I read a story where Kimberly Clark, the tissue maker, developed a big data tool to predict where the flu would hit next, and they shipped extra Kleenix to the affected areas. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We ’ll be able to track, project and anticipate needs of our customers, students, markets, competitors, citizens much more effectively. Like with trust issues with the cloud, privacy issues will be big with big data. But we’ll likely work them through. Andy Hines
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