This is something is strongly believe too… I say “platforms” but data is the flipside of the same coin.
(…) the 20-10’s are going to be the decade of data.
The troves of data being generated by the web are increasingly being captured, structured, and harnessed to add insight, intelligence and value to all kinds of business and personal activity. (…) I think over the next 10 years similar advances in the use of data to create business value are going to occur in a number of different verticals (…) The underlying factor for this, of course, is the rising universality of the web itself, creating a trail of data behind human activity that has never before existed. But the advancement of a number of other technologies allows that data to be captured, analyzed, and put to use in ways not possible just a few years ago…
The existence of the cloud allows entrepreneurs to handle compute-intensive tasks that scaled data storage and analysis require; open source software like Hadoop also makes possible data-intensive distributed applications; and dynamic programming languages like Clojure simplifies multithreaded programming.
A Frog in the Valley 