This is definitely a hot area, but unfortunately, it is also becoming the thing everyone wants to be attached to.
And so the term is becoming increasingly meaningless.
It's 2012s "location-based services" or "gamification" or "cloud" (wait, that's still hot). That said, I suspect big data (at least as I think I understand it) has more legs. But defining what it is is important else it becomes yet another buzzword.
Are compete.com and quantcast big data? Is eBay who analyze terabytes of user meta data "big data"? Is SeatGeek big data? Is Twitter big data?
Just because you have a potentially large database of stuff doesn't mean you are big data. Hopefully the term comes to mean something but right now, I fear it does not.
It's 2012s "location-based services" or "gamification" or "cloud" (wait, that's still hot). That said, I suspect big data (at least as I think I understand it) has more legs. But defining what it is is important else it becomes yet another buzzword.
Are compete.com and quantcast big data? Is eBay who analyze terabytes of user meta data "big data"? Is SeatGeek big data? Is Twitter big data?
Just because you have a potentially large database of stuff doesn't mean you are big data. Hopefully the term comes to mean something but right now, I fear it does not.