Data - Crunching vs. Visualization

Google is opening up their engines for you to crunch on - basically, if you're data is BigTable-able, then you could run your crunch-jobs up in Google-space.  Which is all well and good, but it is getting quite apparent that the ability to crunch is really not the gating factor anymore.  Take the democratization of NoSQL (Hadoop, BigCouch, Mongo, whatever), add in a soupçon of AWS, find an erlang developer or two (so you can do real distributed development :-) ), and your ability to crunch is limited only by your wallet - and not all that much at that.

The gating factor, of course, is Visualization.  Knowing what you are looking for is easy.  Finding something you weren't expecting is hard, and doing this quickly and easily is, well, close to impossible.  Thats where the emergent breed of BigData Visualization companies are really starting to shine.  Me, I'm quite partial to WeAreCloud (Bime from France).  They have a very usable interface, and actually make this fun.  

PostNote:  A friend turned me on to TipTop - I need to see whats going on there...