Introducing Big Data | 21
Over such time, the online store decides to add more functionalities to the website.
One such functionality is to suggest recommendations to potential buyers to improve their
buying experience and help them make purchase decisions.
There are many ways in which the portal can make these recommendations.
• There can be a mechanism to track the past purchasing behaviour of the customer on the
website.
• It is possible to make recommendations based on the navigation by the customer in the web-
site, by tracking which pages on the website are most frequently visited by a customer.
• Similarly, the website may suggest recommendations to the customer of products that
are trending or most popular in the website, based on the purchase history of other
customers.
As understood, the intelligence for each of the above scenarios can be derived through click-
stream analysis, studies of navigation patterns, and through analysis of most frequently viewed
or purchased products on the website.
A second functionality is to make recommendations to the customer based on the company’s
knowledge of the customer. There are several possibilities here.
• A customer may have expressed interest in a particular product in a social network con-
versation. For example, a customer named ‘Julie’ might have expressed specific interest in
purchasing the latest iPhone by tweeting to her friends in Twitter. Being aware of Julie’s liking
towards iPhone, the website may offer her a discount on the model.
• A business gains understanding of the life stage of any customer. For example, a buyer who
has just got into college will have specific set of needs and interests. Similarly, when he or she
is newly married and is setting up a new house, he or she will have a different set of needs.
And when he or she welcomes their first baby, there is yet another set of products that he or
she will be interested in. Again, the social media feeds pertaining to the customer is a good
source of information about the life stage of the customer.
• The business figures out if the customer has friends or relations or affiliates in his or her
Facebook or Twitter network, who can be influencers for the customer, by influencing their
purchase decision. Accordingly, the business can highlight specific products ascertaining to
the customer’s liking or buying interest.
The two use cases discussed above require any business process to capture and process more
varieties of data, and at the same time, data in huge volumes for all registered customers in web-
sites carrying out transactions in real time. However, none of this information is structured data.
Thus, more evolved business cases require a transition to the realm of different varieties and
sizes of data. The subsequent sections use this concept to arrive at a definition of ‘Big Data’.
2.3 THE DEFINITION OF BIG DATA
Before formulating the exact denition for Big Data, it is important to understand the prerequi-
sites of a Big Data system.
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