TL;DR: Info gleaned from just about any source other than company statements and market data, used to guide investment choices. This includes stuff like satellite imagery, which has been used for a long time for these sorts of purposes, but also e.g. social media trends. I guess the news is that there's more of it happening now, because the practice itself isn't new.
Some tangible examples are: credit card transaction data, individual geolocation or foot-traffic data from mobile phone sdks or carriers themselves, receipts scraped/exfiltrated from email inboxes, individual browsing history, or highly targeted web scraped data.