The Big Data Revolution Takes on Consumer Products
The big data revolution is taking on the enterprise space with near real-time infrastructure insight, extremely accurate marketing analytics and more. However, it turns out consumer products are not too far behind – and your shoes just got a whole lot smarter.
The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to the former CEO of IBM’s Tivoli software group Chris Stakutis and Evaluator Group storage analyst Chris Webster, data emitter devices could have IP addresses and share data wirelessly.
“Your milk would have an RFID sensor that would communicate with your refrigerator’s RFID receiver, Webster said Stakutis told him, and your refrigerator would send you a message.”
This concept may have not realized itself in the grocery store just yet, but many others have. One startup did so in the shoes department – a device, described by Webster, which was placed in a drugstore to measure the characteristics of one’s feet so the user can choose the right inserts for their Nike running shoes. This data emitter product is similar to the one envisioned by the makers of Stride Rite shoes, but there are other companies who envision – and actually created – their data emitter products.
One example of such company is TomTom. The European navigation products and services maker offers TomTom MapShare with some of its apps and GPS devices. The technology is used by 30 million users, and aggregates big data about traffic, road conditions and a number of other factors to improve TomTom’s offering. MapShare is similar to the free Trapster app, which got hacked early this year and resulted in millions of compromised accounts.
The big data revolution is spanning all the way from the enterprise to the consumer level, but this sort of technology has been around for quite some time now. One example is the Kodak EasyShare camera, which debuted in 2005. The camera featured Wi-Fi support, and could e-mail the picture stored in its memory to the e-mail address specified by the user.
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