LAURENCE Xu has been a ghost writing scripts for four years, creating dozens of family dramas, love stories and epic productions based on other people’s ideas, and now he is ready to start using his own name.

“My production partners employed big data tools to help me design my first script, which should guarantee successful sales to producers and Internet broadcasting sites as well as audience popularity,” the 25-year-old freelance writer tells Shanghai Daily.

Xu and his partners were inspired by Netflix’s hit political drama “House of Cards” — all episodes made available online at once — which was made in part on Netflix’s big data analysis.

That dissection revealed hidden correlations among three appealing elements — director David Fincher, actor Kevin Spacey and the BBC political thriller series “House of Cards” (1990).

Big data (大数据) is a collection of data sets so large and complicated that it is difficult to process using common database-managing tools or traditional data-processing applications.

China, with more than 1.35 billion people, is made for big data analysis of everything from health to tastes in entertainment and super-computing centers are being established.

China has more than 618 million Internet users and is one of the fastest-growing mobile markets.

According to government projections, China’s information market value will exceed 3.2 trillion yuan (US$515 billion) in 2015.

“In the TV business, big data is now the new ‘open sesame’ that opens any door to investors. It’s their favorite magic phrase now,” Xu says.

Hot topic

The benefits of big data analysis go far beyond the entertainment industry.

The value is yet to be determined and there is controversy over whether analysis of big data truly reflects real-life situations.

Nonetheless, the term pops up on business proposals and negotiations across industries, as have related terms such as data warehouse, scalable data management and data digging.

Only last month, a conference was held in Beijing to promote business opportunities regarding big data in Guizhou, a southwestern province generally considered less developed.

Big cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou started their own big data 3- or 5-year plans in early 2013.

Last May, China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), a key decision-maker in the economy, launched a model big data service platform. It has approved many big data-related projects such as specialized industrial zones and super-computing centers across the country.

Chinese companies, especially Internet service providers, have been busy mining gold from their enormous data sets.

During the past Chinese Lunar New Year in February, while most Chinese were traveling, top search engine Baidu released the Baidu Migration map revealing real-time destinations and travel routes nationwide.

E-commerce giant Alibaba has also released a few reports based on data sets from its large user bases.

The potential business opportunities in unlocking enormous data have attracted not only the sharks. Many small Internet service companies have also tried to grab a share early on.

“You can’t really estimate the real value yet, and it hasn’t really produced real profit, but it’s a hot business opportunity too big to be ignored, and you ought to start early,” says Joseph Lin, a Zhejiang Province native who returned from the United States last year to build a data service company in Shanghai.

Lin’s company, like many of its kind, promotes itself as a data mining specialist. He has bought a few small social websites and online forums, in hopes of combining the user data into “a bigger, more complex, more systematic and more valuable one that will help all kinds of clients to understand their consumers.”

One of the challenges Lin faces is to collect accurate information from willing users at a time when Chinese are increasingly aware of the dangers of information leaked over the Internet.

“I try not to reveal too much of my real identity on the online shopping, traveling and chatting sites,” says 31-year-old administrator Lily Chen. “I changed my credit information when I heard about the Ctrip credit card leak.”

Chen refers to the incident late last month when Chinese travel booking site Ctrip.com told 93 users to change their cards because of a security loophole that made the information vulnerable to hackers. Chen was not told to change her card, but she did so anyway, just to be safe. Since then, the loophole has been closed.

Interest in and controversies involving enormous data sets and new analysis tools have also inspired new courses in universities.

Fudan University in Shanghai launched its first MOOC endeavor — massive online open course — on April 1 with a course titled “Big Data and Information Communication.” It evolved from a seminar on advertising.

Professor Cheng Shi’an, the instructor, proposed 8 to 10 topics. These included the framework and structure of net media, methods and tools for detecting online communities, word-of-mouth dynamics along the social net, and the building, development and interaction within, inside and between online communities.

Data analysis

“For example, the mission of detecting online communities is no longer distinguishing a person from a dog,” Cheng says. “We must reshape the person behind screen, his or her gender, age, district, habits, occupation, and much more.”

Her case study started with the China Business Network (CBN), which releases information on real estate. Cheng used data analysis to explore how to learn the identity of users, their characteristics and behavior, and whether their behavior meets the expectations of the business network.

She also led a team project “Who’s the topic leader?,” for which they collected and analyzed all media practitioners’ (including famous reporters, TV hosts and editors) Weibo microblog accounts to find out how topic leaders behave, such as how much and how frequently they post.

“You too can also be a topic leader if you know the skills,” Cheng says. “That’s the power of big data.”

Freelance scriptwriter Xu hasn’t started his drama, but he has written a 25-page business proposal in which “big data” appears and is highlighted on almost every page.

Among other things, analyzing big data reveals to him and his producers that his target audience’s top concerns are high housing prices, child care, education and food and water safety. The target group: urban residents between the ages of 25 and 40, with high motivation and ability to consume.

His proposed script will combine all the issues and he hopes the production will be premiered on a top internet broadcasting site.

“The story will begin with a child getting sick from tainted food and being hospitalized,” he says.