DATA MINES

Posted on August 6, 2011

By the end of the decade data mines will be common place like the great gold rush of the 1850′s people will flock to this industry. A combination of luck and hard work will allow some to earn a living and a few to make a fortune.

We’re rapidly digitising and moving every aspect of our work and personal lives into the cloud. Over time our ability to organise and control this information will become increasingly challenged.

You can guarantee over time a proportion of this information will be lost, discarded or simply forgotten, but the nice thing with digital information is it is rarely physically destroyed. Just the ability to access it is lost.

The vast majority of this inaccessible information will be rubbish, old documents, photos and general digital junk, but some will be valuable and some might well be worth a fortune.

In the next decade we will reach a tipping point, when it becomes worth mining this rubbish to find the nuggets of digital gold hidden within. And then sell them back to their owners or more likely and more worrying the highest bidder.