Amazon, Alphabet, Alibaba, Facebook, Tencent – five of the world’s 10 most valuable companies, all less than 25 years old – and all got rich, in their own ways, on data.
No wonder it’s become common to call data the “new oil”. As recently as 2011, five of the top 10 were oil companies. Now, only ExxonMobil clings on.
The analogy isn’t perfect. Data can be used many times, oil only once.
But data is like oil in that the crude, unrefined stuff is not much use to anyone.
You have to process it to get something valuable. You refine oil to make diesel, to put it in an engine.
With data, you need to analyse it to provide insights that can inform decisions – which advert to insert in a social media timeline, which search result to put at the top of the page.
In the data economy, power comes not from data alone but from the interplay of data and algorithm.
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy highlights the inventions, ideas and innovations that helped create the economic world.
