
Is Infochimps running from the Data Market business?
Infochimps is one of the early champions of the data market business, and one that I’ve followed for several years. As I mentioned in my last post on the topic, the company has recently begun to pivot towards delivery of their (compelling) Enterprise Cloud big data analysis offering, with the company’s data market origins slipping further […]

Big Data as Core, Big Data as Context, and Big Data as Buzzword Bingo
It’s neither particularly newsworthy nor insightful to suggest that ‘Big Data’ gets everywhere these days, but two recent items reminded me of the gulf between credible execution of a big data play and the more questionable tacking of the big data meme onto an otherwise useful product. Christmas is coming. Which means skating, and pantomimes […]

Nurturing the market for Data Markets
From Microsoft’s Azure Data Marketplace to the eponymous DataMarket, or InfoChimps, Factual, and Kasabi, there’s resurgent interest in the venerable business of collecting, curating, and commercialising data created by others. But despite investment and innovation, there isn’t yet the matching evidence for much use or — even — interest amongst prospective customers. In principle, at least, these data markets […]

Strata Conference 2010: Building and Pricing the Data Marketplace
Pete Soderling of Stratus Security and Pete Forde of BuzzData led a session on Building and Pricing the Data Marketplace. Rough notes follow. What’s the Data supply business now? What’s a Data Marketplace? How do we get from here to there? Today, data is a $100Bn global market. But what is data, and why should […]

Repositories in the Cloud? Why on earth not?!
To be honest, I’ve never fully understood Higher Education’s penchant for building ‘institutional repositories.’ These frequently under-populated aggregations of academic papers produced by ‘research active’ employees of a particular university appear aligned almost exclusively to vaguely expressed institutional imperatives, and seem largely unrelated to either the selfish aspirations of the contributing authors or the tangible […]

A podcast with Flip Kromer of InfoChimps… and the end of an era
I’ve been following InfoChimps for some time, intrigued by their aspiration to build a marketplace for data that combines the free with the paid. Thanks to the team at Jones-Dilworth (honestly, does Josh have any clients that aren’t interesting?) I managed to get some time with founder Philip (Flip) Kromer and Joseph Kelly whilst over […]