Welcome to the Wonderful World of Big Data

Some of the most important thinkers on the planet are in Davos this week, and they're thinking about the same thing a wave of startups are addressing: big data.

Image: Reuters

Welcome to the year of Big Data.

Or at least that seems to be what 2012 is shaping into. Earlier this week, I checked out a pitchfest at which a half-dozen young entrepreneurs were building their companies by parsing the massive amounts of data flooding cyberspace. Now comes word that it isn’t just young entrepreneurs intrigued by the possibilities of organizing all that information.

The bigwigs gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, are in the same boat.

As Barb Darrow of GigaOM reports, big data is a hot topic at the annual conference this week, which brings together economic and political leaders from around the world. Darrow writes:

The overriding issue is finding the right data, applying the right analytics to it, and letting it deal with real-world problems. And the World Economic Forum’s elite attendees, including prime ministers, corporate titans and star academics, purport to address the biggest of big problems: climate change, the income gap, food inequality, public health crises, Iran.

Those are indeed some huge issues, and pretty good topics for big thinkers to tackle. But in the startup trenches, where the companies that could turn into major players of the future are just now gathering, big data is being used beyond even those topics.

The winner of the New York pitchfest, Knod.es, is wading through the data that social networkers use to find those most interested and expert in a variety of topics—a proposition that would allow publishers to more accurately target their own content.

And there are a whole host of other big data firms springing to life right now, with a large number of them in New York City. Matt Wilson of Under30CEO.com, which sponsored Tuesday's pitchfest, describes the scene to Portfolio.com in an email exchange.

He wrote:

Now that platforms that deal with social data, medical records, and RFID technology are maturing and are built on open APIs, the smartest entrepreneurs are figuring out systems to analyze it all. NYC has a huge advantage in this business because our talent pool consists of so many ex-financial analysts, bankers, and developers who have built programs that run Wall Street. Big-data companies are hoping to find buyers with deep pockets, and if that happens we could really see some huge revenues.

So there you have it. Big problems require companies capable of attacking big data, and that could mean big profits for the companies that grow to prominence in the field.