"Big Data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it." - Dan Ariely

"Within two days, we produce the same amount of data generated by at the beginning of the civilization until 2003," said Eric Schmidt in 2010. According to IBM, by 2020 the world will have generated a mass of data on the order of 40 zettabyte (1021Byte). Just think, for example, of digital content such as photos, videos, blogs, posts, and everything that revolves around social networks; only Facebook marks 30 billion pieces of content each month shared by its users. The explosion of social networks, combined with the emergence of smartphones, justifies the fact that one of the recurring terms of recent years in the field of innovation, marketing, and IT is big data.

The term big data indicates data produced in massive quantities, with remarkable rapidity, and in the most diverse formats, which require technologies and resources that go far beyond conventional data management and storage systems. In order to obtain from the use of this data the maximum results in the shortest possible time or even in real time, specific tools with high computing capabilities are necessary. In the United States, the term has become a key concept in 2009 when President Obama created the position of Chief Technology Officer as part of his America's Innovation Strategy.

But what does the big data phenomenon mean? Is the proliferation of data simply the sign of an increasingly invasive world? Or is there something more to it? Pat Nakamoto will guide you through the discovery of the world of big data, which, according to experts, in the near future could become the new gold or oil, in what is a real data-driven economy.