The New York Times reports that data is the sexy theme of this years Davos World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum has also released a report called Big Data, Big Impact, about how big data can affect international development.
Money quote: "Big data represents one of these seismic economic shifts that happens every 10 years," said Zach Bogue, co-founder of a stealth data investment fund called Data Collective. "In some sense, this data has always existed, but until now the bandwidth, storage capability and computing power haven't existed to harness it."