I was hoping you could give a source not because I was questioning the veracity of your statement, but because I wanted to learn more about it, specifically what kind of data that would be and what you do with it. I bet there are a lot of interesting challenges in that space.
People are just beginning to take advantage of these data sources but table stakes is being able to continuously ingest and index many millions of complex spatial relationships every second, which by itself is something no popular Big Data platform supports.
The (fun!) computer science challenge of it is that the systems have to be unbelievably scalable, but you can't use hash partitioning or range partitioning, and many things you were taught about database engine design turn out to be completely wrong in this context. It is an area ripe for innovation and growth.