Should "Big Data" be capitalised?

Can big data be productized?

• This company is apparently successfully prouductizing big data: http://yourstory.com/2013/07/affine-analytics/ What does this mean to you?  How do you see (can you see) big data being productized? This consulting company claims to helps mobile companies productize their data: http://redwingconsulting.com/productizing-big-data/ and sell it to others. But, productizing data sets (even large sets of data) is different than turning "big data concepts" into a product. What do you think about the idea of productizing big data?  Do you know of any companies doing this?  Ideally, do you know of any startups doing this? Thanks!

• Answer:

  Big Data is not a thing; it's an idea or paradigm that defined the increasing collection and use of massive amounts of disparate data.  It's partially a marketing term - like the Cloud, or Green businesses.  Can the mass collection and subsequent analysis - data mining - be a revenue stream?  Of course - in fact, it has.  And it will get [better|worse] as less visible uses are deployed.  At least now, companies are bragging about the data collected and the uses for it - they offer these activities as proof of their flexibility in a changing economy.  But when companies start using data for socially awkward purposes, it may not be as obvious,  For example, a story in the commercial media on how a large department store chain recently stopped tracking cell phones in their stores; for some time, they were using the singling feature of the device - required for a phone to locate and connect in a service cell - to capture and record people's paths through their aisles.  Obviously, they started doing this and 'we' didn't know about it. Companies that offer back ground investigation services routinely use social media sources in their work; perfect examples of Big Data.  The IRS has a number of projects that allow revenue analysts to make ad hoc relationships through legally acquired data; the US Tax Gap is close to $400 billion annually - closing that gap is a revenue stream.  Big Data is big business and has and will continue to strain the definition of privacy.  I worry about the amount of data being arbitrarily collected and stored in unsecured formats.  Someone once estimated that only 20% of the data captured by new US corporate and government programs goes un-analyzed; and 80% was not part of the initial requirements, but captured and stored anyway.   "Just grab everything, it may come in handy later"...  By who - and for what?  Am I going to get turned down for my next job at Apple because I posted this from a Ubuntu system?