
Meet the Firehose Seven Thousand Times Bigger Than Twitter's - coffee
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/meet_the_firehose_seven_thousand_times_bigger_than.php#
======
nostrademons
1000 tweets/second seems quite low. IIRC, when I was still doing financial
software (2007), the markets threw off about 50 GB/day, and a given trade was
about 80 bytes. That's perhaps 600 million trades per day, or an order of
magnitude higher than Twitter. And at the time, stock market volume had
quadrupled over the last two years or so, so it's probably much higher than
that.

I wonder how much, say, FaceBook's newsfeed volume is. Or how much data
Walmart or Fedex or Safeway process from their point-of-sale systems.

~~~
wallflower
> Or how much data Walmart or Fedex or Safeway process from their point-of-
> sale systems.

Walmart is in its own class. There was a rumor a while back that they were
trying to correlate their video feeds (of the POS/checkout) with their
transaction database. That would mean matching video of customers with their
transactions. All of them.

~~~
eru
What would you want to get out of that data? (I can see that it's useful, I
just want to hear what you can imagine.)

~~~
wallflower
In general, an isolated video is not interesting. It becomes more interesting
and potentially scary once you have a digital, searchable, analyzable history
of video customer transactions.

Reduce leakage/theft:

If a cashier has been already flagged and the customer matches up in the
network of cashier's friends (Facebook?), possibly in conjunction with another
theft deterrent system, be able for managers to watch in real time a potential
leakage event (where they don't scan certain items).

Hyper-targeted marketing:

(New) wedding ring detected. Commence deluge of in-kind marketing partnerships
with Home Depot, maybe even Crate & Barrel.

Customer over the past three months has been showing signs of possible
pregnancy relative to their baseline body mass index. Somehow, non creepily,
market to them via 3rd party mailing lists who had no idea how you learned she
was expecting or more subtly by changing the default landing homepage of
walmart.com to reflect more future mother when her cookie is detected.

Kids. If the kids seem hyperactive in the overhead view, email coupons for
toys that appeal to ADD-type kids.

Over the last year of transactions, customer's head has been exhibiting signs
of male pattern baldness. Send them targeted coupons for hats to see if they
think its something they need to cover up.

RFID:

If RFID ever really enters the picture, via Walmart customer RFID cards - then
you can get into real dystopian scenarios of following someone through the
entire store.

