Rick Smolan, former National Geographic and Time photographer, has used a crowdsourced model (of fellow media professionals) to create a series of “A Day in the Life of” books.
He is now tackling the impact of Big Data/analytics on many aspects of our lives and the book should be out later this year. Fortune has a gallery of some of the examples and how they are impacting farming, emergency services and other aspects of our lives.
I found the farming example particularly poignant
“The Climate Corp., a company founded by former Google executives David Friedberg and Siraj Khaliq, provides crop insurance for farmers by analyzing 22 data sets for weather every six hours, calculating about 10,000 scenarios that could happen to a grower during the next two years. They run 34 trillion different simulations that can be used to price hyper-local insurance rates for atmospheric calamity. When erratic rain caused one farmer's corn crop to fail, Climate Corp. automatically compensated him $45,000 for his losses. The farmer didn't even need to file a claim.”
In contrast, I am amazed at pricing for analytics projects in the enterprise. SAP HANA and consultants around it behave like it is still the go-go ERP days. Contingent pricing and payouts? HaHaHa.
I shudder to think what Watson will cost WellPoint over the years. I wonder if they went to Apple and asked for a custom version of Siri or to Google for Now. Or Yahoo! which has been the biggest contributor to the open source Apache Hadoop tool which the IBM Watson team heavily leveraged.
But even more so, the Smolan crowdsourced model shows even for complex analytical projects, there is enough talent around the world to leverage. No need to pay $ 500 an hour for hyped up consultants.
