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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

I'm Ruth Alexander.

Our everyday lives generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data

every 24 hours according to IBM.

And 90% of the data that exists was created in just the last two years it says.

So could we be using this daily avalanche of statistics to make our lives better?

Big data, as it's called, could even save lives according to Kenneth Cuckier,

the data editor of the Economist magazine and co-author of the book Big Data,

a revolution that will transform how we work, live and think.

So what exactly, I began by asking him, is Big Data?

Well, there's no one single definition of Big Data,

but a way to understand it is by its characteristics.

And it basically means that we have vastly more data than we ever have before.

And we have new techniques and tools by which we can learn from a large body of data

things that we never could when we only had smaller amounts to extract new forms of economic value.

And in a way, it turns data into a new resource, a new economic input.

So where is this data?

The data is everywhere.

We're collecting more data about things that we always collected data on before.

...