City can become big player in £216bn data industry

THE ability to store, manage and analyse the “tsunami” of information generated by the multitudinous digital interactions of modern life is set to become big business for Leeds, according to the Yorkshire backers of a global event.
By The Newsroom
Published 9th Apr 2013, 01:01 BST

Big Data Week is taking place in more than 25 cities across the world later this month and will highlight the commercial, technological, social and political impact of this information.

The festival connects cities through local events designed to educate and inspire, networking functions and a data science hacking challenge.

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Organisers of Big Data Week in Leeds say the city is “uniquely placed” to take advantage of an industry estimated to add £216bn to the UK economy and create 58,000 new jobs by 2017.

Peter Laflin, head of data insight at digital marketing agency Bloom and co-organiser of Leeds Big Data Week, said: “Leeds has depth of data expertise developed from the catalogue businesses, digital and financial services sectors and a talent pool from the universities, that position it well to take advantage of the predicted growth. A new industry is growing where we seek to understand how consumers will behave based on patterns they leave behind in data.”

Estimates suggest 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day, which is more data than existed in the world until 1986; as a result, organisations are turning to big data analytics to unlock the value of data and reveal previously unseen patterns, sentiments and customer intelligence, said a spokesman for Big Data Week in Leeds.

Big data is transforming industries like medical science, biology and advertising.

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Callcredit Information Group, the Leeds-based consumer data specialist, is supporting the week, which runs from April 22-28.

Kevin Telford, strategy director, said: “The city is already playing a valuable role in big data. Companies in the area have combined exceptionally talented people, enabled through leading technology and mass data to create new business economies.

“World-class organisations of varying sizes from international to local business level have invested into the growth in big data.

“Many have found creative ways to build service based products for consumers that transform industries; others have found new ways to combine structured and unstructured data such as social data with transactional data delivering new insights.”

The Yorkshire Post is media partner. For more information on Leeds events, visit www.bigdataweek.com/leeds and www.leedsdatathing.co.uk

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