Because of the ability to cheaply process terabytes of information, companies can analyze all kinds of things that weren't
possible before, like Decide.com's price prediction tool that exposes the surprising volatility of consumer electronic prices.
Courtesy Decide.com
One way to understand how big data works is to think about your daily life. You write
an email, call your boss, pass a security camera, maybe buy a plane ticket online.
Taken alone, this is disjointed, boring information. To Elizabeth Charnock, it makes
up your digital character.
"Digital character is this idea that almost everybody these days leaves behind a giant
digital breadcrumb trail," she says.
Charnock founded Cataphora, a company that can process huge amounts of this sort of
data about employees to determine patterns. She says those patterns can predict
everything from a person's mood to their skill as a manager to a person's inclination to
commit fraud.
Take rogue trader Jerome Kerviel, who cost his French bank billions of dollars in
losses.