[boorad]

I can only guess how they're going to do, business model-wise, but big data doesn't necessarily mean big companies or web properties as you suggest. Small startups can do compelling things if they make sense out of big data. It's a tedious and often impossible job now for just about everyone. Companies displaying competence will do quite well for at least the beginning phase of this movement, and have customers both big and small.

My gut says that it will become commonplace to need to handle tera or petabyte-sized data. 640K turned out to be a wee bit shy of our memory needs. Traditional RDBMS's will turn out to be a wee bit shy of our analysis needs.