By Joey Alarilla
INQUIRER.net
WE know what a gigabyte is, but what the heck is an exabyte?
Well, you’d better get used to the term, as the amount of digital content that’s out there is growing at such a rate that “gigabyte” will seem ridiculously small in the near future.
Ronnie Latinazo, country manager of EMC Philippines, pointed out that the digital universe in 2006 reached up to 161 exabytes of digital content (that’s 161 billion — yes, billion, gigabytes).
INQUIRER.net reporter Lawrence Casiraya took that photo of Latinazo using a camphone. We’re here at the Renaissance Hotel for the EMC press briefing, and I’m blogging this via our PLDT WeRoam office account.
OK, now we know what an exabyte is, and how awesome it is that we’re able to create all this digital content. Like what we’re doing now. What’s even more interesting is that 70 percent of this content is created by individuals, Latinazo pointed out. Yup, us. We’re talking about the photos and videos we take with our digcams and camphones.
Latinazo said EMC commissioned the International Data Corp. study “The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010.”
It’s something that’s already happening all around us. We know it, as Netizens and bloggers and YouTubers, but the great thing, as Latinazo pointed out, is that IT execs are finally taking notice of what we consumers have known all along. The creativity is within us, but we need the IT infrastructure to make it happen. Plus businesses need to find a way to monetize all this, right?
This is the digital world in which we live, where we’ll be creating more digital content than all the books that have been written.
Where over a billion songs are downloaded a day in MP3 format.
Where 100 million video streams are shown on YouTube everyday.
Welcome to the digital universe. Welcome to our world.
June 18th, 2007 at 12:46 am
this guy ronnie is freakin OVERPAID