Here is a very insightful and interesting article from the BBC about Big Data and how it could be used to shape the nature of cities in the future. It includes a nice mention for the company I work for – IBM. There are also some great factual snippets which you could use in conversation.

• Each engine of a jet on a flight from London to New York generates 10TB of data every 30 minutes “TweetThis“

• In 2013 internet data, mostly user-contributed, will account for 1,000 exabytes “TweetThis“

• Open weather data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association has an annual estimated value of $10bn “TweetThis“

• Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data “TweetThis“

• 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the past two years “TweetThis“

• Every minute 100,000 tweets are sent globally “TweetThis“

• Google receives two million search requests every minute “TweetThis“