Hot Trends at the 'All Things Digital' Conference

By Julia Boorstin, CNBC Correspondent

NEW YORK (CNBC) -- While the public markets focus on Facebook's (FB) stock movement, the Venture Capital investors here at the "All Things Digital" conference are focused on the next big thing -- which companies are the next $1 billion acquisition or $10 billion IPO.

Social still looms large, but now I'm hearing lots of talk about social commerce.

With talk of sharing platform Pinterest being worth north of $1 billion dollars with tens of millions of users, the question is how to turn all the sharing of images of products into the sale of those products.

The VCs I've spoken to expect to see sales and marketing on Pinterest too, but that's just the beginning.

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NEA partner Patrick Chung is betting on a company called "Curalate," which treats all the information from Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter as results from the ultimate focus group. Curalate mines data from all those sites to help brands understand who's sharing images of their products to better target them with ads and deals. (You can watch my interview with Patrick Chung here.)

But the definition of social commerce is not just limited to sharing services -- Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, who is on the board of Pinterest, also pointed at flash sale site Fab.com as a social shopping site.

But not everything is about social here at D -- there's been a lot of talk about education and Salman Kahn of the Kahn Academy and John Hennessy, president of Stanford University took the stage. Conference host Walt Mossberg asked Hennessy if it's moral and sustainable to charge so much for tuition. With student debt in the U.S. north of $1 billion this is no small problem

While they debated the cost of Universities, investors are looking at turning education into a for-profit business, with a relatively new category, called "Ed-Tech." Chung highlighted NEA's investment in Coursera, which brings Ivy League quality education to the masses, which he says is a market worth tens of billions of dollars. NEA isn't the only one betting on this startup-- it's raised $16 million in VC funding, partly from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, led by John Doerr, who has long pushed for education reform.

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