As recently as 2000, only 25 percent of data was stored in digital form. Less than a decade later, in 2007, that percentage had skyrocketed to 94 percent. And it has continued to rise since.
Digitization dialed up the possibilities for data collection in a remarkable way. Ninety percent of the world’s digital data has been generated over the last two years. Every year, the amount of digital data grows by 50 percent. Every minute of the day, 204 million emails are sent, 2.4 million pieces of content are posted on Facebook, 72 hours of videos are posted on YouTube, and 216,000 new photos are posted to Instagram. Industrial firms are embedding sensors into their products to better mange their supply chains and logistics. The sum of all this is the creation of 5.6 zettabytes in 2015. A zettabyte is 1 sextillion (10^21) bytes, or 1 trillion gigabytes.
Excerpt from Page 154, The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
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