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.

Unfortunately, I'm not getting a clear idea of what defines 'big data'.

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.

Big Data is so hot right now. in Mugatu voice

I created my own startup on BigData, but something personal came up. Please contact me if you are interested in using the domain http://NoSQL.com 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>