This article gets a few things right, but I find it largely to be another example of playing up the hype without talking about the real meat of big data's potential.

Some of the more useful points: 1.) Big data's promise has led to massive advances in technology, and companies are spending billions on this new technology 2.) The limiting factor with Big Data is analytical in nature, not necessarily in storage, processor speed, etc.

What this article fails to address is why big data is so valuable. While it gave one example of a real use case (identifying influencers in social networks), if anything this served to highlight the problem with Big Data. Are companies completely shifting their marketing budgets to target influencers? Is this driving major financial impact for Facebook?

I have no doubt that companies are actively identifying incredibly powerful new uses of big data, but for big data to be truly revolutionary, we need to develop the analytic methodologies and decision-making processes to benefit. Reading the McKinsey report cited in the article is illuminating. There's a ton of value cited, but it isn't particularly clear how companies changed their decisions based on big data in a way that drove the value.

(I posted more thoughts on this broken link between big data articles and actual decision-making here: http://www.klaviyo.com/blog/2012/07/16/the-curse-analytics-b...)