A few providers are not just creating huge data dumps — collecting and structuring data from multiple sources — but creating marketplaces for others to find and use that data. They include Microsoft’s Windows Azure DataMarket and InfoChimp, who hope to connect enterprises with the data they want
Infochimps is attempting to build a data market, and in doing so, the company is wading into some of the messiest and most unstructured data around, attempting to clean it up and put it up for sale. I talk to co-founder Flip Kromer about the challenges.
Bundle uses the billions of Citi customer transactions to draw correlations between spending habits and what other people might enjoy or buy. CTO Phil Kim explains that wrangling even highly structured data takes a lot of organizing, a lot of computing and a lot of time.
Although we’ve seen online office suites added to the portfolio of web worker productivity tools, database tools have been curiously absent from the mix. Even suites like Google Apps lack a dedicated application for managing and sharing specialized data, leaving users creating crude spreadsheet-based approximations.
A pair of slices from a massive scrape of Twitter’s API could be of great use to programmers and researchers alike — as long as users don’t mind. The company behind the mining effort, Infochimps, is trying to demonstrate and promote its data aggregation service while offering up some useful information to interested parties.
At the end of last year, Infochimps posted a heftier version of its scrape of Twitter, which was taken down at the behest of the micro-messaging site over user privacy concerns. By releasing curated, anonymized chunks of data, the company may avoid most of the user privacy concerns that arose last time around. Then again, it may not. Read More about Is Infochimps’ Aggregated Data a Boon to Researchers or a Privacy Nightmare?
