British physicist Stuart Parkin, one of the brains behind the global big data revolution, on Wednesday won Finlands answer to the Nobel Prize, which is awarded by Technology Academy Finland. Prof. Parkin receives the 2014 Millennium Technology Prize in recognition of his discoveries, which have enabled a thousand-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives, the independent foundation said in a statement, adding that his innovations paved the way for streaming movies and other media via the Internet. Parkin, 58, is an IBM research fellow, a consulting professor at Stanford University and director of the experimental department of Germanys Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics. I am extremely happy and excited to have won the Millennium Technology Prize because of course its one of the most important prizes in the scientific community, Parkin said in a statement.