A few weeks ago, I talked to the CEO of an upstart company, Farecast.com. Basically, over the past three years, they have analyzed over 90 billion price points in the airline industry.

So, on the web site, you can see a prediction on whether an airfare will increase or decrease over the next seven days.

I asked the CEO what types of employees the company has. Answer: data miners, statisticians, economists and so on (yes, lots and lots of brainpower).

Basically, with the growth of the Internet, there has been a corresponding explosion of data. Now, some entrepreneurs are developing companies that leverages this data.

Another example is: Zillow. It's a real estate site that cranks through huge amounts of data to allow people to appraise the value of a home (called a zestimate).

Interestingly enough, the name of the company is a play on words; that is, Zillow's software looks at zillions of data points. For example, the Zillow database has price estimates on about 67 million homes.

This week, Yahoo! agreed to strike a deal with Zillow. True, this deal fits with Yahoo!'s experimentation with social networking and Web2.0 techniques. It is also a way to better penetrate the local advertising market (which appears to be the next battleground for Google and Microsoft).

But, I think there is something else: No doubt, Yahoo collects huge amounts of data. Just imagine if it starts building applications that leverage the predictive qualities of this data? It could mean a slew of new product offerings.

In other words, Yahoo!'s deal may be a way to learn about data mining – which could really be the "next big thing."