– Our vision is to empower societies, says Telenor

Yesterday, Telenor hosted the Telenor Expo-conference along with partners around the world to explore new ways to give value to the society, using their own data. With the name, “Big Data for Social Good”, the aim was to offer different perspectives and to map future possibilities for the use of big data.

– Our vision is to empower societies, President and CEO of Telenor Group, Sigve Brekke said in his welcome speech.

While the idea is now fermenting all over the globe – in academic quarters as well as in business and in civil society – the benefits envisioned are still mostly in the future. However, the current digitization will transform all aspects of the Telco industry and the way consumers increasingly use and rely on mobile technology, according to Telenor Group.

Telenor Research has identified six important trending areas for 2016:

– The trends we have highlighted are not radically new, but we believe that 2016 is the year the adoption or the application of these will start to be felt. 2016 will be an exciting year for telecoms as we face evolving customer expectations, competition, regulation and accelerating technological change. Change that in our opinion brings more opportunities than it does challenges, Bjørn Taale Sandberg, Head of Telenor Research, said in the press release.

One of the trends highlighted is how Telecom big data will be used more in 2016 to tangibly help society – for the purpose of social good.

Yesterday at the Big Data event, Ph.D at Harvard School of Public Health, Caroline Buckee, showed her study as an example on how mobile phone data can improve disease prediction, in this case Dengue fever in Pakistan.

– What we´re doing wouldn’t work unless we will continue to be innovative, and capitalize of innovations like big data, special advisor on global health at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tore Godal said.

While Bernt Apeland, Executive Director at UNICEF Norway showed us The Global Goals For Sustainable Development, – We have to do business in a different way than we have done before. The use of big data is going to be crucial. Mobile technology will be one of the more important instruments we have to achieve that goal; we can already see that mobile data is really making a change for children in Uganda, Apeland said.

Secretary General for Norwegian Red Cross, Åsne Havnelied said that we should focus on impact and emergency response. – Real-time data is essential, and it is important for the humanitarian organizations, she claimed.

InnoMag will continue to follow up on the trend on investigating what big data can do for humans, societies and businesses.