A yottabyte isn’t what happens when the Jedi master starts gnawing on your leg. It’s the information equivalent of one quadrillion gigabytes, or 1024 bytes, and is enough digital data to fill the states of Delaware and Rhode Island with a million data centers, according to Backblaze. While the world hasn’t yet seen many yottabytes, industries like Internet search, genomics, climate research, and business analytics are starting to create massive data sets — in the peta- and exabyte range — that are requiring an entirely new set of big data tools to manage.

The emergence of this so-called big data phenomenon is also fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate, to the way people interact, to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. On March 21st and 22nd, GigaOM is throwing an event about the future of this big data ecosystem in New York, Structure:Data, and for the occasion, we’ve highlighted 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Enjoy:

Can gigabytes predict the next Lady Gaga?
How big data can curb the world’s energy consumption
Big data is now your company’s virtual assistant
The future of Foursquare is data-fueled recommendations
The tale of how Twitter data tracked cholera in Haiti
Revolutioning web publishing with big data
Can cell phone data cure society’s ills?
How data creates video hits
The new face of data visualization: the iPad
One hospital’s embrace of big data

Images courtesy of Flickr users dalbera, TJ Sengel, Drew Stefani, hisperati, Vadim Lavrusik, medul.la, Roshan Vyas, Samantha Celera, Mr. Thomas, Elmastudio, and PetroleumJelliffe.

Go to page 2 (of 11) on GigaOM .

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