There is a range of timespans that Real Time applies to. In data acquisition, say a medical signal such as an electrocardiographic signal or an EEG signal, we are talking milliseconds.
I wouldn't think of web transactions as real-time, even though there is user expectation of response within a certain small number of seconds.
In the context of the investments mentioned, these seem like the data comes in asynchronously, not matched with a specific request, and that the interesting work to be done is to make sense out of this non-fielded data.
As someone else said here in this thread, Google made search interesting again using essentially unstructured data--no real metadata to get your ERD around. Similarly, the other sources we are thinking of also don't really have that much structure--no tag saying HERE-IS-WHAT-YOU-ARE-LOOKING-FOR. To me, this is why these are interesting problems.
I wouldn't think of web transactions as real-time, even though there is user expectation of response within a certain small number of seconds.
In the context of the investments mentioned, these seem like the data comes in asynchronously, not matched with a specific request, and that the interesting work to be done is to make sense out of this non-fielded data.
As someone else said here in this thread, Google made search interesting again using essentially unstructured data--no real metadata to get your ERD around. Similarly, the other sources we are thinking of also don't really have that much structure--no tag saying HERE-IS-WHAT-YOU-ARE-LOOKING-FOR. To me, this is why these are interesting problems.