Maureen O'Gara

The ballyhooed "Big Data for the masses" start-up, ClearStory Data, which made a bit of a splash back in March when it got seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures and a bunch of industry luminaries has gotten a first round worth $9 million from chi-chi Silicon Valley VC Kleiner Perkins, with Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures pitching in.

Former Twitter VP of engineering Mike Abbott, now a managing partner at Kleiner, will join the board.

The start-up is promising to deliver a newfangled Big Data analytics solution for the non-techie business user like Mad Men's mythical marketing maven Dan Draper that integrates private and public data sources in a sleek interactive engine. The platform is supposed to simplify access to relational databases, Hadoop, web and social application interfaces, and third-party data at scale to search out trends and patterns.

Users are supposed to be able to explore and analyze information at a level previously reserved for the most sophisticated of quants such as 2012 election prognosticator Nate Silver.

The company says business strategy will be tweakable on-the-fly in response to micro-level trends identified through Big Data correlations.

The widgetry is currently in beta with GA to be determined.

Ahead of launch ClearStory points out that next year more data will be generated every 10 minutes than from the dawn of humanity until the turn of this millennium. Even accounting for the burgeoning of the World Wide Web during the past decade, IDC estimates that the digital data created and replicated in 2011 - which amounted to something like 1,800 exabytes - was 10 times greater than it was just five years before. External data sources today expose more than 7,000 open data APIs, up from almost zero in 2005. Making sense of all this data is supposed to drive a $16.9 billon market opportunity for Big Data by 2015, according to IDC.