What does housewives' porn consumption have to do with your startup? It's in the data

Who knows that there are basically a lot of desperate housewives in Indonesia, reports Tech in Asia

Melvin Sumapung works with corporate strategy and business development at big data and analytics firm Dattabot (previously Mediatrac). He’s standing on the product stage at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2016, and he’s talking to us about porn.
 

“Who knows that there are basically a lot of desperate housewives in Indonesia?” he asks. A slide in his presentation shows all four iconic Desperate Housewives actresses, along with the result of a survey of 50 to 60 million people: “We find that, counterintuitively, housewives watch mobile porn a lot more.” 
 

Given enough data points, one can pull information on a number of trends and relationships. But how do you pull useful data when there’s so much out there?
 

 

Hurdles
 

The product stage is so packed that I can only manage to cram myself into the back of the room, where I and other standing individuals stand nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. Melvin says that good big data insights require connectivity, intelligence, and integration. Indonesia faces challenges there because internet penetration in the country is only 34 per cent and the big data industry in the country is quite young.
 

“In order for you to get a lot of data to be turned into insights, you need to overcome these [technological challenges]. There are a lot of data formats, structures, sources,” Melvin tells the crowd. “Preparing them is very time-consuming and complex.” 
 

Solutions
 

Indonesia’s big data connectivity problems are best tackled in the public sector, where Melvin finds the best opportunity to make the public feel the value of big data. In turn, they’ll want to use big data more, in what he sees as a “very, very reputable feedback loop.”

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This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here