If pencil marks on some colossal doorjamb could measure the growth of the internet, they would probably be tracking the amount of data sloshing through the public network that spans the planet. Christened by the World Economic Forum as "the new oil" and "a new asset class", these vast loads of data have been likened to transformative innovations like the steam locomotive, electricity grids, steel, air-conditioning and the radio.
The astounding rate of growth would make any parent proud. There were 30 billion gigabytes of video, e-mails, Web transactions and business-to-business analytics in 2005. The total is expected to reach more than 20 times that figure in 2013, according to Cisco.
How much data is that? Cisco estimates that in 2012, some two trillion minutes of video alone traversed the internet every month. What is sometimes referred to as the internet's first wave — from the 1990s until around 2005 — brought completely new services like e-mail, the web, online search and eventually broadband.
For its next act, the industry has pinned its hopes, and its colossal public relations machine, on the power of Big Data itself to supercharge the economy.
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