Flooded by information?

In a world where everyone needs information, but nobody can easily find it, business can be made by selecting precise and reliable data and delivering it quickly. See how a startup did it.

It's striking to think that until a few decades ago there were still "forbidden" books or information that very few could access, and today we live with an unprecedented excess of information. Today, thanks to everything that free access to the Internet gives us (Google, social networks, Wikipedia, blogs, etc.), we could access the knowledge of thousands of professional careers. According to the social network Quora, the information available on the Internet until 2012 would have taken over 230,000 years to read at 250 words per minute. It's truly striking to analyze how since the arrival of the Internet, Google, smartphones, etc., humans are generating a universe of information. As a reference:

• In 2003, the world generated 5 Exabytes of information (an Exabyte is a million Gigabytes)
• By 2010, we created 5 Exabytes in 2 days
• And by 2013, we created 5 Exabytes in 10 minutes.

And this trend only accelerates exponentially every year. Google has done an excellent job in making it easier for us to access information; however, there is so much information that sometimes it is very complicated to find what we are looking for quickly and reliably. A few days ago, I had the opportunity to interview Juan José Mora, founder of Atlantia Search, a startup that undertakes the task of doing what even Google cannot do, that is, giving us the specific information we need, without spending much time, with reliable sources and even advice based on the analysis of that information. Juan José decided to start his company after realizing that in his previous job, they were about to make a decision worth millions of pesos based on Yahoo Answers (something very unreliable). "They say that information is power, but having bad information is very dangerous, and on the Internet, less than 20% of the information is validated. The curious thing is that many companies and institutions make decisions based on this unreliable information," he says. With this universe of information, it is not surprising that the market research company IDC (International Data Corporation) tells us that between 15 and 35% of employees' time is spent searching for information on the web, without finding it. This translates into a typical company of 1,000 employees in the US spending between 6 and 12 million dollars a year searching for information without finding it. Atlantia Search has found a simple solution to this: you simply send them a request for information, they send you a quote, and later the required and validated information. Probably in a few years, technologies like IBM's "Watson," Apple's "Siri," or even Google itself will be able to give us quick, specific, and reliable answers. However, until that happens, outsourcing the search for hard-to-find information to experts is a good option to solve the excess of information we face every day.