Manufacturing, retailing, bike sharing and city governance have been put on the fast track to improve efficiency with the help of big data, which has also been relied on for media development in the future, according to participants of a forum on Monday.

Internet communication should better use technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things, said Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba Group, on the Internet Communication and Social Responsibility Forum, part of the 4th World Internet Conference.

The conference began Sunday and ends Tuesday in East China's watertown of Wuzhen, Zhejiang province.

According to Ma, the winners among the media in the future will be those based on a consumer to business model, or answering their users' demands.

Ma's view echoes with that of Song Jianwu, a professor of Renmin University of China. Song told China Daily on the sideline of the forum that data will become the fundamental unit of information production in the future.

"Whether you have the data, whether you can process and analyze the data to promote new production and consumption, all of these could lay the foundation for economic development in the years ahead."

At the same time, Wang Jian, chairman of Alibaba Group Technology Committee, said at the forum that human beings are generating an important resource - data.

As to the data-based "brain of the city," set up by Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary, its development will bring brand-new and real-time information resources to media practitioners, according to Wang.