Big Corp, that are known to have actual big data are also hardly known for being early adopters... It will take much more time than expected to see data-driven companies and I actually think the finance industry will be the first to do real, sensible big data analysis.
It will also take something more than Hadoop and the like to do something real... Don't like to be that guy, but please, stop rewriting yet another query language and try to write efficient engines instead. ;)
I worked at a financial software startup from 2005-2007, and the financial industry was already using big data pervasively. Hell, LTCM failed in 1998 because they were doing big data analyses of small spreads and forgot about some of the holes in their analyses, namely what would happen if a "black swan" event moved currency prices out of their historical norms. Quant hedge funds like DE Shaw, Citadel, and RennTech have been around since the 80s.
Heck, back in high school one of the math competitions I won was sponsored by INFORMS (the Institute For Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and I asked my dad "What's operations research?" and he said that it's where people with math Ph.Ds go to make big bucks. Companies like FedEx, Safeway, and WalMart have relied on their massive amounts of operations data to do things like minimize transportation costs or ensure that they're stocking items with maximum demand for decades.
The thing is, everybody who gains a competitive advantage from big data has reason to keep that fact secret, so that their competitors don't start doing the same thing. What's changed now is that the media itself is facing competitors that use big data themselves to make themselves more relevant than traditional media, and so suddenly it's a Story Of Consequence. It's not that big data is the next big thing - it's that big data was the last big thing that you are only hearing about now, and suddenly a bunch of folks that had never heard of it are now trying to play catch-up.
It will also take something more than Hadoop and the like to do something real... Don't like to be that guy, but please, stop rewriting yet another query language and try to write efficient engines instead. ;)