State of the Union

was reused. It led to the innovation of a second use for the drug ostensibly for destroying a protein associated with nearly half of all cancers.

In the next two years alone 40 zettabytes of data will be created — an amount so humungous that there are no utilitarian frames to exhibit its size and scope. A zettabyte (ZB) is a unit of digital information storage used to denote the size of data. It is equivalent to 1,024 exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000 bytes.

If we were to accede to the logic that data is the new oil then a data refinery is but its logical extension. It would mean that new sources of crude data would have to be provisioned to enable this enterprise to generate revenue from this resource. Raw data from multiple sources would flow into this factory, including people contributed proprietary data, procured data, open source data and streaming data. The enterprise would then crunch the data to create new intellectual properties through a combination of processes proprietary information, domain expertise, analytics, software and permutations of data sets. This freshly cultured data would then be stored in databases customised to the mode and gauge of the data just as oil derivatives such as gasoline, heating fuel and motor oil are stored in various cisterns. The refined data products would then be disseminated to consumers over the Internet as analytic acumen or used to foster new products. However, all this would have to be done within an ecosystem of legal, regulatory