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(Reuters) - When Jason Goldberg set out to raise a new round of funding for his flash sales site Fab.com, he dispensed with the usual PowerPoint presentations and instead gave potential investors a look at the crown jewels: the "dashboard" of real-time analytics that can instantly spot trends and enable the site to tweak its offerings on the fly.
The company soon closed a $40 million round of funding from blue-chip venture capitalists including Andreessen Horowitz.
Such is the allure of big data, a buzzword that refers to the newfound ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of information on almost every dimension of the human experience. In sectors ranging from retail to healthcare to social media, the promise of Big Data has venture capitalists salivating.
"The best themes are the ones you can see everywhere and big data is everywhere you turn," said David Hornik, a partner at August Capital.
Venture firms invested a total of $2.47 billion last year in fields around big data, including database management and data processing, according to Thomson Reuters data. That compares to $1.53 billion in 2010 and $1.1 billion in 2009.
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Venture investors are building their strategies around a few key themes within big data.
Accel Partners' Ping Li controls a dedicated $100 million Big Data fund, carved out of bigger Accel funds. He divides the themes into four, starting with the storage and networking services that support big data platforms. Amazon, with its web-services business, is an example.
The next group is the type of company that builds the platforms that enable the analysis of huge volumes of data.
That would include his own portfolio company, Cloudera, and others such as Hortonworks, backed by Benchmark Capital and Yahoo. Cloudera and Hortonworks help companies work with Apache Hadoop, an open-source software framework that helps organize and manipulate big sets of data.
Once the data is set up in an analysis-friendly way, businesses need software applications that make sense of it. Here, Li sees two more areas for investment -- what he calls big data apps, and data-driven apps.
A prominent big-data app is Domo, the business-intelligence service run by Omniture founder Josh James. It has snagged $63 million in funding from venture firms like Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital.
Data-driven apps -- meaning the data is used in a way that drives another app, rather than analyzed and managed for its own intrinsic value -- range from companies like the Climate Corporation, which takes myriad data points about the weather and uses them to price crop insurance, to Lookout, which uses data to protect mobile phones.
Others, such as John Connors of Ignition Partners or Jim Smith of Mohr Davidow, prefer to think of the apps category as consumer-focused or enterprise-focused.
In the enterprise category, Connors gives the example of his and August Capital's portfolio company Splunk, which allows companies to analyze data in a way that in the past might have required expensive data warehouses and specialized, hard-to-deploy technology. Splunk filed for an initial public offering last month.
