Entrevista com Hal Varian

In 2010, the human race created 800 exabytes of information, from tweets and Facebook updates to PowerPoint presentations and photographs. That’s 800 billion gigabytes, or the amount of data you can fit on 75 billion 16-gig iPads. To put that into context, between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, we only created five exabytes; now we’re creating that amount every two days. By 2020, that figure is predicted to sit at 53 zettabytes (53 trillion gigabytes) – an increase of 50 times.
Multiply data and you multiply the need for people to make sense of it. That’s where Varian and the statisticians, analysts and econometricians who work with him come in.
Data is like food, says Varian. “We used to be calorie poor and now the problem is obesity. We used to be data poor, now the problem is data obesity.” Google’s strength, he continues, was to recognise back in 2001 that “we would be handling massive amounts of data, and would need to develop tools for that.”