The Role of Big Data in US and Canadian Marketing Strategies
Thompson, an explorer and cartographer who charted most of western and eastern Canada, as well as the northern United States, is regarded as the greatest land geographer of all time. Thompson traveled roughly 90,000 kilometers by foot and canoe and used the information he gathered to produce what he called the "great map"—the most thorough record of the territory of more than 3.9 million km2.1 His chart unleashed North America's commercial potential. Big data is as significant to Canada in the twenty-first century as Thompson's topographical data was in the nineteenth century It has the potential to transform Canada's current business and environmental situation. Big data is a word that describes the massive amount of data that today floods the world. In 2013, IBM said that 2.5 exabytes — or 2.5 billion gigabytes — of data were generated everyday. Data is accumulating so swiftly that over 90% of it has been collected in only the last two years (Marr 2015). This d