Flash Drives Bring Big Data to the Little Guy: Big Data Done Cheap in the Palm of Your Hand

Flash Drives Bring Big Data to the Little Guy, the data once reserved for the multinational corporations, can now be accessed by a SmartPhone and used to help people and organizations compete with the big guys. A 2013 article entitled, Big Data Done Cheap by Quentin Hardy provides insight:

• “…flash memory has become better and cheaper – thanks not just to cameras and big commercial systems, but to the explosion of smartphones and tablets….”
• Today:  “…currently done on multimillion-dollar racks of computers”;  By 2015:  “few thousand dollars might be deployed for sophisticated data analysis”

Over the past 25 years I have traveled the world flying jets, running businesses and providing advice to top military brass, government officials, corporate executives and startup businesses.  Most of the work I have done has focused on how to get the best out of people and organizations using human centered data analytics.  Think data with a human touch.  We now are at a major inflection point in the history and future of work and wise small and medium sized business owners and leaders are poised to leapfrog their competitors.  They will do this by coupling intuition and art with hard data and science.  Here are a few examples how this will happen:

• Flash Drives are something everyone understands.  You take a thumb drive and pop it in your computer to share photos, music, videos with friends and family.  You save games on a flash drive so you can get more out of your Xbox 360.  You swap corporate presentations, docs, spreadsheets, marketing material, product catalogs, service manuals and training material with your business colleague or partner.
• Flash Drives technology (flash memory) makes big data for the little guy possible.  Flash memory is cheap; it’s reliable with no moving parts like disks; it’s light weight, making it great for mobile devices, like cameras, smartphone, tablets and phablets – and USB flash drives; it’s a memory storage technology that uses minimal power.
• Flash Drives that now connect to Android mobile devices, iPhones and iPads are making our SmartPhones truly on the go (OTG) computers with large storage capacity to store big data — called quantifed self.  Moves to larger screen phablets by Apple and Samsung take all of this to the next level
• Flash Memory Databases.  The new in-memory databases, which are faster and cheaper than traditional dbases, make it possible to dramatically slash computing power and increase the ability to run big data analytics at affordable prices for the little guy.