The Importance of Data
Given the mostly negative press that data aggregation techniques have received over the last five or so years, it is easy to write it off the practice as a whole. Many people have tried, whether it has been through deactivating their Facebook accounts, using Tor, or giving up those addictive internet quizzes, but there is no escaping the pervasion of data in our everyday live – and for the record, it is not a bad thing. We as human beings are constantly making decisions. Through the advent of mass data aggregation and tracking, we are able to make those decisions slightly more informed than we would have in the past. What should I get for lunch? Try the taco place that just opened up – I know that you love Mexican food and the reviews for it are great so far. Should I go get my nails done today? Better not, it is going to take you thirty minutes to get over their with traffic and it looks like it is going to rain just as you are finishing up.
Cambridge Analytica, among others, have shown us how this data can be used in nefarious ways, but there are a bevy of companies doing it right and actually using the information and analysis techniques to give us a leg up on life. Google comes to mind first, and with their partnerships, whether that is the WHO or the Weather Channel, have yielded positive predictive measures that have led to early evacuations and treatment.
We at QuiGig have taken notice of these methods and are heavily lacing our platform with data-driven insights aimed at improving the lives of freelancers. Ever wanted to know exactly what types of jobs in your skillset pay the most right now? Or what about what is in the highest demand? In the future, after people are using our platform, you will get those answer in real time. Our partnership with IBM will afford us access to some of the top analytical minds in the world, but in the meantime, we have done research and analysis of our own. Internally, we have developed a document analyzing every city and town in this nation and ranked their populations based on a number of characteristics.
This ranking data, which you can access here, has a number of interesting points of note. The first this you will notice is that this population data is broken down past cities, and in some cases focuses on counties, small towns within a large area, or burroughs. This is why Jackson Heights has the densest population in the country and why Carson is the most diverse. Take a look at the dataset yourself – where does your hometown rank? Are they particularly young? Well educated? Diverse? I know QuiGig’s hometown, Houston, ranks as the largest city, but isn’t quite as diverse (as a whole) as we thought it was. And it ranks in the middle as far as a young population goes, but is highly college educated! We have our work cut out for us in such a amazing – and large city – but if QuiGig can take off in a place like Houston, we can bring our data-driven decision making across the country, and eventually, the world.
