Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future (RF) has a decision to make about the direction of his company. Recorded Future’s “temporal analytics engine” is a set of quantitative and visualization tools that could help predict future events from past events recorded on websites, blogs, Twitter and other public sources. In the past RF had used its tools for governmental and financial services organizations, using each organization’s private data. Now Ahlberg is considering joining a number of other companies in the multi-billion dollar consumer data broker industry. He’s considering the creation of a set of standardized (versus bespoke), Software as a Service applications, using a stockpile of public data, and consumer records. This data will be used to predict consumer or crowd behavior.
Which of the sources of the data broker industry’s power is least responsible for the power to predict consumer or crowd behavior?
A. The rise of “Social Media” throughout the modern world
B. Moore’s Law and the availability of cheap computing power
C. Big Data tools such as Hadoop
D. Inexpensive storage of huge amounts of data
E. Availability of broadband telecommunications capability throughout the modern world