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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
Unfortunately, I'm not getting a clear idea of what defines 'big data'.<p>When Facebook started, they wouldn't have been considered a 'big data' company, would they? Or same with Twitter, so how are they defining the start-ups that suit these funds?
This news couldn't come at a better time, we've been building a side effect database for almost 2 years using big data sets from several different sources. It's functional and a few people have picked it up but we only recently began talking about looking for outside funding. 2012 should be interesting for us and our competitors.
I created my own startup on BigData, but something personal came up. Please contact me if you are interested in using the domain <a href="http://NoSQL.com" rel="nofollow">http://NoSQL.com</a> to apply for this venture capital. Or, put another way, I am looking for a co-founder - I am very technical and also run my own businesses. </shameless plug>