Ron Conway Says Real Time Data Is A Real Big Market


Angel investor Ron Conway says real-time data is the next real big thing.

Yet it might not produce Silicon Valley’s next Google. One or two monster companies will not dominate the market. Instead it will nurture a wide range of firms, Conway said Thursday at the Always On Summit and Stanford University.

Conway, one of Silicon Valley’s top angel investors, has been touting this latest investment theme for several months. But on Thursday he attached numbers to the market opportunity.

Today, real-time data is 1 percent to 2 percent of Web content. In three years, it will climb to 25 percent of the content on the Web, he said. That will make the market a $5 billion opportunity.

“I think this is the next multi-billion dollar market,” he said.

Conway didn’t say how real-time he expects investment returns to be. But with Twitter and other companies beginning to focus efforts on making money, perhaps the pay days won’t be as delayed as in the dot-com world of Web 1.0.