The term big data has become one of the hottest technology buzzwords in the past two years. We now increasingly hear about big data in various media outlets, and big data start-ups have increasingly been attracting venture capital. A good example in the area of retail is Target Corporation, which has invested substantially in big data and is now able to identify potential customers by using big data to analyze people's shopping habits online; refer to a related article at http://nyti.ms/19LT8ic.

Loosely speaking, big data refers to the phenomenon wherein the amount of data exceeds the capability of the recipients of the data to process it. Here is an article on big data that sums it up nicely: https://www.oracle.com/in/big-data/guide/what-is-big-data.html.