Data needs to be processed

When you have a lot of stuff, you need to be able to know what you are looking for and then find it. That's where processing comes into picture; and its a huge business.

In the big data world, "tools" make a huge difference to get some use out of the large banks of information we are collecting, creating, duplicating and throwing in one huge heap. Tools fall into a few buckets but broadly

1. Organizing tools that help you to put some structure to madness- these force you to make a plan and stick to it.
2. Search tools to help you locate something specific in a huge pile- these work great if you know whats in the pile and how to look for it. 
3. Presentation tools that organize stuff, sort it and make it look like its all neatly stacked. 

We would love services like that for the physical world but the apps, systems that do just these basic items focus on specifics and don't cross boundaries. For example, there are business card managers, calendar managers, mail managers, news feed managers, photo managers/organizers, video managers/organizers. try to mix any of these up and you have a fruit salad. 

This is the big data opportunity and tons of companies are jumping on the bandwagon!

Data needs to be stored

We create bytes to revisit, relive, make sense of the events or experiences at a later date. Real, hopeful or anticipated, once we digitize something, its there to stay.

Stay

To keep bytes from losing, we employ ingenious strategies. We make copies, tag-em, bag-em, sort-em, order-em, file-em, or in many ways archive-em. Sending ourselves e-mails, burn DVD's, copy on USB drives, or store them safely on the cloud so that if we need them in the future, we will have them. 

By just trying not to lose we compound the problem of a large number of bytes we create.

Speed

We are a hugely impatient lot when it comes to browsing. When we say for instance, keep 1000 photos on instagram or icloud or facebook, we cannot wait a couple of seconds for the poor site to bring it up. Now to give us our pictures really fast, these sites do something ingenious, they break down the pictures into smaller blurry images and throw them at you so you have something to work with. 

You guessed it right- that added more bytes. now you had large crisp files to store, not lose them and keep them coming your way fast so you multiplied them up. 

Pry-proof

Some of us dont like others watching our pictures, especially while we are moving them over the internet- so we do something called encryption. This in effect adds a dark screen over your pictures while moving your bytes from one point to another.  Even though this is not a huge addition, you temporarily create a mini monster for a short duration of time, that is created, stored, transmitted in a pry-proof manner.

So now you see, we have built a capacity to create digital monsters, fearing losses, we pad them to weather time and prying eyes; to overcome our impatience, miniaturize them. Now our already big and growing data got bigger and grew some more.