Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

We ARE Big Data

At EMC World last week, ten-thousand of us got together in person to discuss what happens when cloud meets big data. Through the wonders of Social Media, we were able to extend that conversation well beyond the physical confines of the event, to hundreds of thousands more.

It was simply awesome to watch.

As we've done in recent years, we had a really cool 'buzzboard' running on plasma screens throughout the event (See screenshot below). Somewhat par for the course, our buzzboard scrolled tweets and images tagged #EMCWorld in real time. It's a good reminder of the digital discussions that take place alongside the physical.

During his opening keynote, EMC CEO Joe Tucci shared that in 2010, the digital universe was 1.2 zetabytes. By end of decade, it's projected to be 35 zetabytes. That's 44x growth. WOW!

To that end, we added a new twist to our buzzboard this year - The 'Big Data Meter'. Here's a screengrab from the counter on our EMC World Facebook page.

 

 

We set out to project the amount of digital information generated during an event such as EMC World. To get there, we looked at social activity from last years event and made some assumptions based on audience growth.

We then turned our attention to the logistics of this years show... How many keynotes, how many breakout sessions, how many hours of live broadcast, etc;.

The net net here - Between tweets, blogs, images, breakout presentations, keynote videos, live broadcasts and the like, roughly 100 terabytes of information a day was created and added to the digital universe during EMC World.

And, as we watched it all unfold in real-time, I'm convinced that our assumptions going in were rather conservative.

My takeaway - big data is not merely an interesting theme on the horizon. It's not a phenomenon specific to big companies. Rather, it's here, it's now, and it's all of us...

More information on our exploding digital universe over here.

Lots of Little Data = Big Data

Wow. Well that was quite the event. If you missed it, EMC unveiled 41 new or revamped products - likely the biggest launch in the history of EMC.

I'll leave all of the cool details around the products themselves to our industry elites... As a primer, Chuck shares an overview, as does Chad, Barry and 'Zilla.

eBiz types can rest easy knowing that Social was an integral part of the event. Between a buzz building campaign leading up to 1/18, some Facebook fun to help drive speculation, live Q&A via the EMC Community Network, and much more.

Given all of the effort that went into this, I'm happy to report that #EMCBreaksRecords trended nationally on Twitter during the event, and that social activity was responsible for approximately 28% of traffic to EMCBreaksRecords.com web site.

But what struck me most during the event had little to do with the launch itself, nor social per se... EMC CEO Joe Tucci was on stage talking about the history of EMC, and providing some thoughts about the future of information...

Experimenting with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

For a gadget geek, working in high-tech can offer up a pseudo candy-store like experience. When visiting HQ, I always do my best to run through our main data-center. It's staggering to see first-hand just how much technology has advanced in just a few short years. Long gone are the days of the MV8000 and countless racks of tapes.

So the interesting technology of the week? VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure.

Where You @?

Greetings from my first visit to SxSW. Talk about a whirlwind of activities, conversations and provocative technology. I'll definitely be back.

As impressive as the collective intelligence assembled for the event is, the feat or actually pulling off something of this magnitude is equally incredible. Show organizers deserve considerable credit, as does the enormous army of volunteers who apparently assemble from across the globe to make the event a success out of sheer passion.

A view from the SxSW Bloggers Lounge

Among the things that I'll take away is the widespread use of geo locating apps like FourSquare and Gowalla to connect attendees. I've found myself using Twitter a bit less than expected, and rather have leaned more on geo based apps to find local trends, where my peers are, sentiment on sessions, etc;. Twitter recently added location support for Tweets and Facebook is expected to do the same in the near future.

Legitimate privacy issues aside, this is more than just the latest trend. It's yet another step in adding important contextual information to conversations. From a business POV, imagine being able to track where your teams are - understanding things like support staff deployment, and your ability to deploy resources to customer issues more efficiently based on their location? Wow.

If you haven't already, grab your flavor of geo based apps from your favorite app store and start exploring. It's likely to spawn all sorts of legitimate business use cases for you. And while you're exploring, feel free to connect with me (LenD) on both FourSquare and Gowalla.

Update: Kudos to Microsoft and Paypal. $.25 to charity for every geo checkin during SxSW. They just hit the $15k mark. Impressive. More info at CheckinforCharity.com.

Celebrating 20 Years of Web

The latest edition of ON Magazine is a must read for anyone who's interested in the evolution of the web. It takes a refreshing look back at the history of the Web, and contains fascinating perspectives from some of the biggest names in the biz.

Coincidentally, my love for the online world started exactly 20 years ago... A bit of a 'right place, right time' scenario. Of course, in 1990, there was no Web browser, per se. Usenet was all the rage and everything was completely text based.

Things got really interesting when NCSA Mosaic hit the stage. At the time, I was working in a call center helping employees at Data General solve their PC problems (and boy were PC problems easier back then).

I remember asking myself if we could put answers to commonly asked questions on this 'web thing' in the interest of self-service. Well, this little 'experiment' resulted in 30% call deflection during the first two weeks. I was hooked.

This edition of ON Magazine poses three interesting questions throughout. I thought it would be interesting to pose the questions to some of your favorite EMC bloggers and others to learn a bit more about them.

I'll kick things off, and then nominate our next victim errrr, blogger. 

The Digital Universe set for its own Big Bang

Greetings from EMC World. Things are in full swing here in Orlando, FLA... An amazing show last night from the Gin Blossoms, our bloggers lounge is full of activity and Joe is about to take the stage to formally kick off the week.

No doubt you'll be seeing plenty of activity coming out of EMC World this week, but I couldn't resist mentioning this IDC white paper on the Digital Universe. It's an update to a similar piece from last year, but the numbers this go are all the more staggering.

Some highlights :

• 487 billion gigabytes of information were added to the Digital Universe in 2008.
• In 2012, there will be five times as many bits created or captured and added to the Digital Universe as in 2008.
• For all the information we create as individuals - taking pictures, updating our Facebook profile, sending emails, watching HDTV programs - an amount greater than that is created or captured about us in the Digital Universe.

I found the paper numbing. It talks about the impact of the economic crisis on the growth of the Digital Universe. Turns out - there hasn't been one. By that, even more information was generated in 2008 than predicted (by a factor of 3%).

While the Digital Universe is expected to grow by a factor of almost 5 during the next four years, IT budgets are only expected to grow by a factor of 1.2. (Note - warning flag should go up here...)

So, we're generating tons of information - and ease of producing and publishing information becomes easier each and every day.

The need for security and information management techniques will be key to organizing, managing and CONSUMING all of this information in the days to come, and the demand put on IT organizations will be enormous.

It's a provocative and well written piece... Definitely take some time to give it a read. And don't forget, you can monitor your own contributions to the Digital Universe with this nifty Digital Footprint Calculator.

That's all for now. Standby as we'll be doing our part to contribute to the growth of the Digital Universe from down here at EMC World.

The Wave 3 Report - Social Media Trends

I came across a rather interesting report from Universal McCann. The Wave 3 report is the third in a series that dives deep into measurement for trending, usage, sentiment and geo adoption of Social Media. If you're evangelizing Social Media in the enterprise - and making a case for investment - you may want to leverage the data in this report.

Some interesting notes -

- The vast majority of users surveyed are now producing content
- Asian markets are leading the way - creating more content than any other geo
- China has the largest blogging community - with over 42M bloggers
- Video is the big up and comer - up from 31% penetration in 2006 to 83% in 2008
- Bloggers are increasingly posting thoughts on products and brands

Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3

view presentation (tags: socialmedia research social media)