The world is awash in data. There is data coming in from research, phone calls, satellites, phones, fitbits and even your Bluetooth connected fridge. Collecting data isn’t our problem, being able to process it is. Before you can process it though, it needs to get transported. In that sense it’s like any other raw product. Like a piece of iron ore, it needs to be transported to a foundry and dumped into a furnace to be refined so it can be turned into something useful. Data needs to make it from your IOT device to a server where it can be processed and analyzed. Too often, transportation and processing are bottlenecks in the transformation of raw data into useful information.
Think about a highway, you can only increase the volume of cars on the road so much before it descends into chaos. Yet there may still be a need to get even more vehicles, or at least people and products from point A to point B. So you need to come up with new ways to handle the traffic. Data is similar. Most data is still transferred over some kind of copper wire. That wire can handle only so many electrons moving through it, just like a highway only being able to accommodate so many vehicles. For years though, those older copper cables have been getting replaced with fiber optics. Basically long pieces of very thin, flexible glass, fiber optics use photons instead of electrons to transfer data. Immediately, there is a gain since the medium allows for faster movement of data. There are also new fiber optics being developed that allow for speeds up to a 100 times faster than what is currently available. How fast is that? Just for a point of reference, imagine walking at 100 times the pace you do now. Instead of power walking at around 3-4 mph, you would suddenly be able to walk from Chicago to Washington D.C. in less than three hours.
Yet, that presents its own problems. Fiber optics have a massive capacity for data because of their ability to send many signals simultaneously. However, when you get too many signals going through at once it becomes a jumbled mess. It’s similar to how one person’s echo is easy to understand but the echo of a choir singing is indecipherable to the human ear. Thankfully, there are clever software writers out there who can write the necessary algorithms to untangle that mess. In fact, with the new fiber optics that will be coming out soon, the bottleneck won’t be the data transportation, it’ll be the ability to untangle that data into discernable bits of information so it can be analyzed. Essentially, the physical technology is already here, we are just working to bring the software side of things up to the same level.
In a sense the kind of data analytics and processing that TARTLE works with is similar. The standard way of aggregating data from second and third parties has a lot of noise embedded in those signals, even after it has been processed. That is because there is a lot of circumstance and context mixed into the kind of data that is gleaned off monitoring your devices and internet activity. And as it turns out, there is no mere algorithm that can filter out that noise. The only way to get a clearer signal is by doing something the big companies rarely do, go to the source, to you the individual. The answer to “why” you did one thing instead of another is the only algorithm that can truly help decipher that data. It gives the context that is missed when companies only look at your data and never to you as a person. TARTLE provides an avenue to get the answer to “why”, making our system the most efficient way to get clear and accurate data about people and why they do what they do.
What’s your data worth? Sign up and join the TARTLE Marketplace with this link here.
