Big Data has been a Big buzzword for sometime now. But how prevalent and important is its use? Here's a snapshot of a few of the varied and interesting uses that was in the news (The links in the headings provide more information.)

Big Data in the Music World

Engineers and biologists from Queen Mary University of London, Imperial College of London and a data scientist from Last.fm analyzed 17,000 digitized songs from Billboard’s Hot 100 to produce an evolutionary history of American popular music. They found that the most important cultural shift in American pop music began with the explosion of rap in the early 1990s.

Big Data in the Energy Sector

The Ronald Reagan building in Washington DC saved $800K in energy costs in the 1st year with its Big Data solution.

Big Data in Transportation

Transport for London (TfL) oversees a network of buses, trains, taxis, roads, cycle paths, footpaths and even ferries which are used by millions every day. The data is collected, and used for planning and providing customer-specific info.

Big Data in City Government

Chicago has collected 12 years of data on resident complaints on rodent problems. Now it is harnessing that data to control the rat population. Rodent prediction involves 31 variables related to calls about overflowing trash bins and food poisoning in restaurants.

Big Data in Oil and Gas

Shell is using the help of HP and Amazon to create a data-driven oilfield to bring down costs.

Big Data in Online Retail

Personal online stylist Stitch Fix uses Big Data to personalize mass retail. The algorithms emerge from customer surveys, Pinterest boards, weather patterns (another example of where weather data comes into play), and personal notes to stylists.

Big Data in Allergy Medicine Supply Chain

Allergy season drives many of us crazy! Many vendors now are combining data from thousands of stores of different retailers and cross-referencing it with weather, pollen and other data to make sure they can meet consumer demand—and not miss out on potential sales. The use of data in that way is critical to retailers as they try to operate lean supply chains and work with consumer goods that sell quickly.

Big Data in Beverage Supply Chain

Diageo is using IoT to manage each Johnnie Walker Blue Label bottle's unique identity and associated dynamic data, allowing it to capture real-time supply chain analytics.

Big Data in Farming

Companies like Monsanto, tractor maker Deere, and technology giants IBM and Intel are competing with many Silicon Valley startups vying for farmers who will see data as an integral part of farming.

Big Data in Weather

The Weather Company's global B2B division WSI processes approximately 2.2 billion unique forecast points worldwide, and averages more than 10 billion forecasts a day on active weather days. WSI and IBM have partnered to enable enterprise clients and industry ecosystems to integrate WSI weather data into their operations and decision-making.

As a consumer and not professionally connected to the real estate industry, I was still interested in reading the big real-estate news that Zillow Inc. has agreed to buy Trulia Inc. for $3.5 billion. So immediately, I thought that Zillow plans to go straight to the consumer after the merger and cut out the realtor, especially since the founders had disrupted the travel industry with Expedia and Hotwire.

But Zillow claims that they are not out to rock the real-estate industry model. Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of Zillow has maintained that Zillow and Trulia are media companies, not real-estate brokerages. They regard the real-estate brokers as their customers.

As far as the average consumer is concerned, we are still looking to buy or sell homes through agents, but we now use the tools provided by online websites such as Zillow and talk to our realtors after doing some preliminary research. We in turn expect our agents to be marketing our homes using their entire suite of tools which would include a savvy online presence. So this merger may not affect us directly.

Real-estate professionals are more wary of this merger and are concerned about higher advertising costs. However, regardless of the messenger, whether it is Zillow or Trulia, big data is here to stay for the real estate industry. These sites offer data analytics in insightful, actionable format and the real estate industry needs to view them as marketing allies not their competitors (as yet).

So how do Zillow and the other websites add value using data? According to this Mashable article, the companies mine census information, consumer surveys, listings, geographic information data and combine with their own proprietary user-generated content to create a customer’s property's potential value and help them understand trends. But the interviewed realtors state that calculations don't take into account recent sales, developer incentives, community developments etc. and thus the online valuations are usually inflated.

MarketWatch reported that only about 15% of real estate professionals can afford to use Zillow or Trulia. There is definite scope for improvement to increase the company’s customer base. With this merger, the new company should look at ways to work with the real-estate industry in a more collaborative fashion by exploring solutions to questions such as:

How can the results be made more accurate - what other pieces of data can be used?
What customized information does the user (realtor, consumer) need?
How can the other players such as lenders be brought into this marketplace?

The win-win scenario would be for Zillow/Trulia to provide more accurate and meaningful analytics while providing a wider reach for the realtor, thus emphasizing its role as a real-estate media company. Only then will the realtor see value in spending money on these sites.

And as a consumer, I expect my service provider to leverage the most effective resources available to bring value.

Big Data in the News