5 Big Data Projects That Could Impact Your Life

It's huge. It's number-heavy. And many say it has the potential to drastically change the way our business, government, academia and healthcare fields operate

But what does "big data" really mean?

It's a swanky term for a not-so-sexy concept: the idea that mass amounts of information can be analyzed to find hidden patterns, buried beneath terabytes of numbers, in Facebook posts, Google searches and Amazon purchases. These patterns can predict social trends and, in some cases, reengineer the way we live.

And it isn't newGCN argues that the first "big data" software was IBM's DB2, a database management system it released back in 1983. What's new is the ability to compile and process everything at such large scales — and quickly.