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With Iceland’s DataMarket.com, Founder Hjálmar Gíslason is on his
fourth startup, and ready to expand overseas. Focused upon becoming “Google
for datanumbers,” DataMarket concerns itself with collecting and providing
access to quantitative data; numbers from governments, international
agencies, and commercial providers around the world.
Alongside the business of collecting data and making it available for
download, DataMarket has invested in providing tools with which users can
visualize data (typically in the form of a graph) and even compare results
from diverse sources. Hjálmar sees these tools as part of a strategy to
ensure that it is
“more desirable to use data on DataMarket than at the source.”
Hjálmar also discusses his view that four characteristics of data make it
profitably sellable; proprietariness, timeliness, analysis, and curation... (more)
Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards
effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud
Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to
deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving
from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, CA, and
Cisco — are on board. The usual holdouts — Google and Amazon, of course
— are not. So what is TOSCA trying to achieve? How does it fit alongside
all the dead, dying, or ponderously deliberating cloud standardisation
effor... (more)
The CloudCamp unconference returned to London for the 14th time this evening,
regaling a capacity crowd in the Crypt below Clerkenwell’s St James Church
with several hours of discussion and debate on the somewhat elusive topic of
‘Big Data’.
Rather rough notes of the proceedings follow, after the break.
LEF‘s Simon Wardley kicked proceedings off as usual, once again managing
to pepper an on-topic canter through the topic with a seemingly never-ending
stream of Flickr images of cats… and analogies to electricity. You possibly
had to be there? His core message, though? There’s noth... (more)
Image via CrunchBase
Chris Hathaway sees basic location information scattered across the websites
of hundreds — or thousands — of coffee shop chains, hotel groups, and
fast food joints, but argues that it’s almost impossible to do anything
more sophisticated with the data than find your closest Starbucks. His
company, AggData, is attempting to fill what he sees as a gap in the market;
scraping addresses and other facts off company websites to create simple
files of store locations that can then be enriched with coordinate data and
sold.
Customers for this data include competito... (more)
Having received some $27 million in investment from big names like Andreessen
Horowitz, LA-based Factual is one of the better funded examples of a ‘data
marketplace.’ But Tyler Bell, the company’s Director of Product, is not
sure that Factual necessarily fits most people’s perception of what a data
marketplace should be.
Focussed — for now — upon aggregating location data, Factual provides
access by API or download to a pool of over 55 million places in the US and
other territories. A key differentiator for the company is their investment
in cleaning and harmonising information ... (more)
Paul Miller works at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web, providing the insights that enable you to exploit the next wave as we approach the World Wide Database. He blogs at 
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