How is big data impacting business and people? Have you ever searched for or bought a product on Amazon? Did you notice that Amazon started making recommendations related to the product you searched for Recommendation engines are a common application of big data. Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify use algorithms based on big data to make specific recommendations based on customer preferences and historical behavior. Personal assistants like Siri on Apple devices use big data to devise answers to the infinite number of questions end users may ask. Google now makes recommendations based on the big data on a user's device. Now that we have an idea of how consumers are using big data, let's take a look at how big data is impacting business. In 2011, McKinsey & Company said that big data was going to become the key basis of competition supporting new waves of productivity growth and innovation. In 2013, UPS announced that it was