Hollerith punch card

50 Things That Made the Modern Economy

BBC

Business

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2019

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Data is a hugely profitable commodity - if you know how to process it. Tim Harford tells the story of Herman Hollerith, and how his 19th-century machine for processing census data laid the foundations for some of the world's most valuable companies.

Transcript

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0:00.0	50 Things That Made The Modern Economy With Tim Harford
0:14.0	Amazon Alphabet
0:18.0	Alibaba Facebook Tencent Five of the world's ten most valuable companies
0:25.6	by the summer of 2019 all under 25 years old and all got rich in their own ways on data.
0:38.5	No wonder it's become common to call data the new oil.
0:45.0	As recently as 2011, five of the top ten were oil companies, now only ExxonMobil clings
0:51.6	on.
0:53.2	The analogy isn't perfect.
0:55.4	Data can be used many times, oil only once.
0:59.7	But data is like oil and that the crude unrefined stuff isn't much used to anyone.
1:07.5	You have to process it to get something valuable, diesel to put in an engine, insights to inform
1:14.4	a decision.
1:16.4	Decisions such as which advert to insert in a social media timeline, which search result
1:22.1	to put at the top of the page.
1:24.3	Imagine you were asked to make just one of those decisions.
1:28.1	Someone is watching a video on YouTube, which is run by Google, which is owned by Alphabet.
1:33.9	What to suggest she watches next?
1:37.1	Peek her interest and YouTube gets to serve her another advert.
1:41.6	Lose her attention and she'll click away.
1:44.8	You have all the data you need.
1:46.7	Look at all the other YouTube videos she's ever watched.
1:49.8	What is she interested in?
	...

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