Monica Rogati, a data scientist from LinkedIn joined Jawbone (popular for making the Jawbone UP device which tracks your movement). Techcrunch says:

“Jawbone has made a key hire that shows some of the direction the company is headed towards when it comes to the quantified self and wearables development. To me this shows the general direction in which this company as well as the world of electronics is moving in. Tha Jawbone UP device by itself is merely a sensor, something which is by definition dumb. The power of this device comes from the what it senses i.e. the information it gives us.

Sensors gives us data not information

Say you wanted to track your running. Scenario (1): Use an app like RunKeeper, it takes data from your GPS-enabled phone, measures distances, estimates calories burnt and gives you nice graphs of how you’re doing. Scenario (2): Instead of running with your GPS-enabled phone and have an app track you, just remember a rough version of your route, use a map to get distance run and plot all those lovely graphs yourself. The difference between (1) and (2) is that there’s not much of a difference, except that (2) is just more painful to do. (1) and (2) are same as long as you don’t convert your data into information.

Enter the connected universe

The fun with scenario (2) is that the data you’ve created is now available for you to easily share with who ever you want,it is highly accurate and can be analysed easily. Instead of just sitting there with you it can now be sliced and diced to produce insights: maybe you’re most likely to break your running streak on the third day, may be you run better in the mornings, all of this information is unlocked once once analytical intelligence is applied to the data you’ve generated. And you don’t have do this slicing and dicing yourself - there are tons of services and people ready to do it for you. What’s my point? I’m trying to say that the device itself is nearly pointless — it is something that creates data, what really matters is who or what can take that data and convert it to information. It is a natural trend that more and more devices are going to be connected and join a network.But unless we’re using these connections meaningfully, we’re going to end up having fridges with Twitter. This state of all objects in your life being connected to each other is referred to as the internet of things. But the important part to remember in the internet of things revolution is that the things don’t matter, what matters is the information they can give you.

Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine — Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP at Gartner