One of the hottest topics in business analytics today is “big data,” defined by Wikipedia as “a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time.”

How big is “big data?”

Last year, consumers and businesses around the world are estimated to have stored more than 13 exabytes of information on PCs, laptops and other devices — the equivalent of more than 52,000 times the information housed in the Library of Congress. An exabyte is 1 followed by 18 zeros, or a billion gigabytes.  And the amount of data stored in such “technological memories” is growing 25 percent a year, said Martin Hilbert, a researcher at the University of Southern California.  These were some of the estimates shared at the The Economist Big Data Conference last June in Santa Clara, CA. (for complete story see http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/business/s_745039.html). Continue reading →