Multi-structured or unstructured data with highly variable formats and semantics – examples are social media content, log files, and e-mail. Multi-structured data comes with many difficulties – information can be mined, but for it to have meaning and value, sentiment and context must be derived as well and correlated with master data for customers, products, and so on.

Twitter’s growth rate has improved in the last quarter, but only after falling sharply for a year. In Q4 2012 its monthly active user count was up 10.8 percent quarter over quarter, and up 10.3 percent In Q1 2013. But growth sunk to 6.9 percent in Q2 2013. Twitter’s share pricefell 18 percent when it reported growth had slumped to just 3.9 percent in Q4 2013, prompting concerns of a growth crisis. And $TWTR got dragged down 11 percent to itslowest value yet so far when its Q1 2014 growth rate improvement to 5.8 percent didn’t impress investors.

 It’s not something that you wake up and decide, I’m going to be a Data Scientist today. Curiosity won’t help unless you have the background or talent for gleaning insight out of terabytes of data

"Those skills are incredibly hard to find," Brady said. "We have examples in our risk analytics and quantitative groups of roles that have been open for a long time."

The intent of Practical Data Science with R is to be a useful concrete example of how to do data science. We limited ourselves to working in R not because a data scientist can choose to work exclusively in R (they can not), but to limit the number of external tools and considerations we had to discuss before getting to the actual examples. To use our book you will need to work the examples (and this can be as shallow as cutting and pasting code or as deep as trying variations after the data has been loaded)

The key to successful marketing with technology is to make sure employees have the right tools available to them in order to accurately monitor customer behaviour. Once again this is something Amazon has covered as Redshift processes and analyses big data quickly, providing employees with accurate, up-to-date customer insights.

83% are concerned about how to target customers and prospects on social media.

No matter what degree they earn, Candido says, data scientists are never done learning. “Staying up on what’s new in the field is extremely important, if you don’t you will get left behind very quickly,” he says. “Participating in data mining contests is one way to stay up. Keep an eye on the people who are better than you.”

There is increasing acceptance that big data will get ever better at measuring our behaviors As more of our world becomes ‘datafied’, we can capture ever-more intimate details of our lives.

If you produce the value, then you are a classic product company. But there are new systems where value is being created outside the firm, and that’s a platform business. Apple gets 30 percent of the cut from other people’s innovations in its app store. I define a platform as a published standard that lets others connect to it, together with a governance model, which is the rules of who gets what. Business platforms are often engaged in consummating a match. It’s a match between riders and drivers with Uber. It’s between travelers and spare capacity of guest rooms in Airbnb.