[Update: check Steve Job’s video at the end of this article]
To most of the discussions happening at the time, big data is another fad. Serious players know that world is now changing, and will be driven completely by data in near future. With consumers (and organizations) going from Mobile Present to Mobile First to Mobile Only, Google Search will not really be the biggest thing happened ever over internet as it is today and the context driven actions done inside the apps will be the future. Human interaction ( Going to Google and searching for How to tame a dragon ) will not be required and behavior will change.
42% of organizations have more than 50TB of data with 6% of them having > 10PB (credits: IOUG Big Data Strategy Survey 2012). This is the data of whats happening with physical and online entities as well as human behavior. This is the data which will tell how much time you spent over apps / websites doing what, how many products were sold in your shop at what time and what else was happening in the world which triggered the sale, how much time you spent doing sex and how vigorous was it (check this ), is human race getting dumber or smarter and with what pace, how many cars crossed a particular spot on road in last n years etc.. Data will be infinite out there. 32% of companies use this data by pre-processing it and then loading data warehouse for integrated analysis and 14% conduct big data analysis separately from traditional enterprise analysis (credits: IOUG Big Data Strategy Survey 2012). The current setup, thus is exactly like what retail commerce was in 1990s. And world is changing so fast that analysis done by Big Data as a separate process might be stale to use it for next day.