Sensor Networks Top Social Networks for Big Data

With the firehose of information enabled by Facebook, Twitter, location-based services, and other forms of social media, the era of Big Data is upon us. However, outside of the consumer world, the stakes are much higher: While advertisers and consumers are focused on monetizing sites that have hundreds of millions of users for a few pennies each, the ubiquity of connectivity and the growth of sensors has opened up a larger storehouse of information that will not only help businesses profit, but will also boost safety and enable environmental benefits.

For example, a Boeing jet generates 10 terabytes of information per engine every 30 minutes of flight, according to Stephen Brobst, the CTO of Teradata. So for a single six-hour, cross-country flight from New York to Los Angeles on a twin-engine Boeing 737 — the plane used by many carriers on this route — the total amount of data generated would be a massive 240 terabytes of data. There are about 28,537 commercial flights in the sky in the United States on any given day. Using only commercial flights, a day’s worth of sensor data quickly climbs into the petabyte scale — for a single day. Multiply that by weeks, months and years, and the scale of sensor data gets massive.

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