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RFID and the Expanding Universe of Data

Big Brother may turn big in pervasiveness bordering on omniscience. There is terabytes about us as we stack up on everything that plastic will let us get. By the way I love the Master Card "Priceless" ads that try so hard to make unbridled hedonism look completely humane.

I like the Toffler-esque Future Shock quality of this article in Wired. Maybe exaggerated at this time given the state of the art. I should know some part of that working for a company that eats, lives, breathes gazillion terabytes of customer data. The industry has not figured the way around the "Albanian Grandmother NYT Reader Paradox" quite yet, but I see the point the doomsday prophets are making.

For the highly profitable organization that they are, I had expected to see something remarkably different about how they source and analyze data - the lifeblood of their existence. Almost expecting that to be the factor that differentiated them from the competition.

Reality is fairly disappointing. Along with many others in their tribe, several millions have been burnt on the way to El Dorado. That one datawarehouse that will answer it if you have been able to formulate the question and what's more predict the future for you. Isn't that a little bit like a hoping to deliver a manufactured God ? That still born effort and many suites of un-deployed analytic products bear testimony to the ravages of the journey.

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