(IDC)
The amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years, says
The Economist in a special report on managing information. According to IDG, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. By 2013 the amount of traffic flowing over the internet annually will reach 667 exabytes, according to Cisco.
Comments (1)
by jabelar
It is useful to return to the basic concepts of scarcity and abundance when discussing economics. Money is made when you apply an abundance of something to solve a scarcity elsewhere. And when something becomes newly abundant, then whole new industries can arise. For example, when semiconductor logic circuits became abundant companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco were able to take that new abundance to lead whole new industries.
So with a new abundance in data, there should be significant industries springing up in many fields.
Also, as to the article indicating that this abundance of information is a problem note that having so much information is only a problem if it is conflicting. As long as the data is consistent, I don’t think there is any problem if you can simply sample the data set or otherwise reduce the “resolution” to facilitate analysis.