GigaOM Pro

It's time businesses put their real-time information to work as quickly as it's collected.

Earlier this month, I moved to a new house. The new place offers me the luxury of space, which has allowed me to acquire a rowing machine to get some much-needed exercise on days when getting to the gym is hard. The machine, which I ordered from Amazon, was going to be delivered by United Parcel Service (UPS) on Monday — sometime between 8 a.m. and 7.30 p.m. The idea of waiting for a delivery "sometime" during a 12-hour window is enough to get anyone’s blood boiling. Given that the machine had set me back a few hundred dollars (plus a nice chunk of change in delivery fees), the idea of losing productivity for a day while waiting to take the delivery was particularly galling. Start looking at our modern lives, and you suddenly discover that our society leaks time through these kinds of inefficiencies on a daily basis, despite the emergence of technologies that can deliver reliable, affordable real-time data. That means a big opportunity, not only for large companies to overhaul themselves, but for little companies to rise up and develop products that can turn corporations more real-time.