ICT and Big Data

GE Brings Big Data to the Masses with Web Series 'Datalandia'

GE’s imagination at work is going Hollywood with Datalandia, a web series created to help consumers understand the cumbersome world of the industrial Internet. Filmed at Miniatur Wunderland, an attraction featuring model trains and towns in Hamburg, Germany, the "summer blockbuster"-like series, replete with blood-sucking vampires and extraterrestrials, aims to show that the Internet as we know it infiltrates much more than what meets the eye.

By Sheila Shayon | Published 11 years ago | About a 2 minute read

GE’s imagination at work is going Hollywood with Datalandia, a web series created to help consumers understand the cumbersome world of the industrial Internet. Filmed at Miniatur Wunderland, an attraction featuring model trains and towns in Hamburg, Germany, the "summer blockbuster"-like series, replete with blood-sucking vampires and extraterrestrials, aims to show that the Internet as we know it infiltrates much more than what meets the eye.

Datalandia (a title nod to the IFC hit series Portlandia) illustrates that “the Internet of things encompasses far more than their refrigerators and thermostats; it's also the data-enabled industrial contraptions used in air travel and healthcare — or the Industrial internet," Ad Age notes. "The industrial Internet is the layer of data that sits on top of those machines," Linda Boff, executive director, global brand marketing at GE told Ad Age. "Imagine if your jet engine could tweet."

To that end, GE recently announced a Hadoop-based, big data software called Historian. “GE’s industrial-strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity but the next era of computing,” said Bill Ruh, GE’s VP Global Software Center, in a statement. “The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement — but it is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data.”

Ruh said industrial data is growing at twice the rate of other types of data and that GE generates about 5 terabytes a day in its labs. Hadoop “allows the data to scale across multiple nodes, while the time-series component helps manage the influx of tiny pieces of data that comes in almost constantly,” notes GigaOm. “In some ways the demonstrations that GE showed off, are taking direct design strategies from consumer applications such as Facebook, and its software options, called Predictivity, are designed to connect the data coming in from machines to people in user-friendly ways.”

If that didn't sounds like the simplest thing ever, it's because it's not. With the help of Datalandia, GE hopes to simplify the complex topic so consumers and users alike can start to realize the benefits that big data can have on everyday life.