The data question is something we are taking very seriously. I talked a bit more about this in another comment, but we know that in many cases data is heavy and is often the limiting factor. We are building a robust data platform ontop of Hadoop + Spark, so be able to handle large amounts of data, and so that we can deploy code to where the data is.

That said, I think there are many algorithms that will work as standalone algorithms. Lots of machine learning type algorithms are mostly CPU-bound. There are companies like http://www.kooaba.com that do image recognition as a service over HTTP. Also things like Siri and Google Now seem to work well enough, despite network latency. Thanks for the feedback!