[thorwed123]

Hadoop rather mapreduce came from Google which is a great innovation.

Cassandra came from Dynamo; And Dynamo is from Amazons R and D efforts. Btw Amazon is an innovation as it leads to large amount of savings in energy.

Thrift,Tornado,HipHop -> not innovations useful programming tools but not gonna change anything.

Rarely any innovations have come out of Web Applications. In fact the best innovation in data mining [The correct term for Big Data], have come from Universities or R&D efforts of IBM/MSFT/Google/IBM/Amazon.

[william42]

Are you seriously saying that Google and Amazon aren't web application companies?

[aphexairlines]

Amazon is of the web, but it has a big impact dependencies on the physical world as an enormous retail & logistics operation.

[FrojoS]

Sure! The Kindle for instance is one of the greatest pieces of hardware I ever owned.

[rhc2104]

The Open Compute Project produced a data center with a PUE of 1.07, making it far more energy efficient.

Disclaimer: I work for Facebook.