Data mining and usage has vastly increased over the past few years, and that trend is sure to continue, to no one's surprise. But what you might not know is that the rate is increasing. Fast. And seemingly at an exponentially increasing rate that's making the dawn of the internet look like a joke. Let's dive in and take a look at the data.
Source: IDC & Forbes
2013: 4.4 Zettabytes / year
2015: 10 Zettabytes / year
2020: 44 Zettabytes / year (more people suspect we'll exceed this amount based on growth since the study was published)
2025: 180 Zettabytes / year
How much is a Zettabyte anyways? It's 10<sup>21</sup> bytes. Or one trillion gigabytes. In order to move that much data around, there Internet Service providers have their work cut out for them, since a good portion of that data will either be online or at least get transferred online at some point. Hardware manufacturers & cloud storage will need to be able to keep up as well. But the data also needs to be mined and deciphered.
Data Mining Solutions
There's lots of data mining companies and services out there, but they're not equipped to handle the amount of data we're expected to see in the next few years. Perhaps an even bigger problem is that a lot of the data is 'missing'. It's not being used, interpreted, gathered, or analyzed because the data is in the hands of small businesses like Amazon resellers or bloggers for example. By themselves, the data is useless to pretty much everyone but themselves. But what if you could gather all this data together? Put it together. Analyze it. And interpret it. People would have access to data that no one else has had before because their small scale makes mining the data impractical. How can this be done? Enter <a href="https://repux.io">RepuX</a>.
RepuX
RepuX is a marketplace for small to medium-size businesses (e.g. amazon resellers, gaming websites, bloggers, & e-commerce stores) to sell customer data directly to data analysts or 'developers' and they can do so without having a data analyst or any blockchain expertise themselves. Developers buy data from these SME's on RepuX's marketplace. Once the developers and analysts are done deciphering and interpreting customer data, the small businesses can elect to buy the data back from the developer should they choose to do so to help grow their businesses. But developers can also sell this data to much larger enterprises who aren't using the RepuX platform. This allows the small business to monetize their data in a way that wasn't feasible for them to do previously.
A lot of the demand RepuX projects to see in data growth comes about from the Internet of Things (IOT). Essentially devices that are all interconnected to one another, whether it be your cell phone, car, thermostat, refrigerator, pacemaker, or alarm clock just to name a few. As more IOT devices get added and interconnect with one another in our day to day lives.
Token Sale
RepuX is launching a token sale starting March 6th 2018. They already have a working product, but are looking to raise funds in order to really be able to scale the platform and bring it to the masses. Before you seriously consider investing, have a read over their white paper first to get a more technical understand of what stage their product is at, and how they intend to revamp the big data landscape.