Big data analysis is currently hot, and will almost certainly only get hotter. You can apply big data analysis in many areas, but only a few have been tapped so

Big data analysis is currently hot, and will almost certainly only get hotter. You can apply big data analysis in many areas, but only a few have been tapped so far. What used to be $CRAZY_EXPENSIVE amounts of computing power can be leveraged to provide new insights into existing fields. In a word: Hadoop. Combine that with your NoSQL tech of choice (HBase, Cassandra, Riak, etc).