Chapter 2. Data in the 24/7 Connected World

By the time you are halfway through this paragraph, 2.5 million Facebook users would have exchanged contents online. Google would have received more than 4 million search requests. More than 200 million email messages would have flown over the Internet and some 275,000 tweets would have been heard.1 Never before in the history of humankind have we been able to generate a living history of ourselves. In the process, we are creating new data of immense size and scope. It is indeed a transformative change to see that within a few decades we have moved from complaining about the lack of data to a data deluge.2 This makes data analytics even more exciting and indispensable.

At any point in time, the global ...

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