Data Companies Poised to Leverage Open Data
July 27, 2015
Support for open data, government datasets freely available to the public, has taken off in recent years; the federal government’s launch of Data.gov in 2009 is a prominent example. Naturally, some companies have sprung up to monetize this valuable resource. The New York Times reports, “Data Mining Start-Up Enigma to Expand Commercial Business.”
The article leads with a pro bono example of Enigma’s work: a project in New Orleans that uses that city’s open data to identify households most at risk for fire, so the city can give those folks free smoke detectors. The project illustrates the potential for good lurking in sets of open data. But make no mistake, the potential for profits is big, too. Reporter Steve Lohr explains:
“This new breed of open data companies represents the next step, pushing the applications into the commercial mainstream. Already, Enigma is working on projects with a handful of large corporations for analyzing business risks and fine-tuning supply chains — business that Enigma says generates millions of dollars in revenue.
“The four-year-old company has built up gradually, gathering and preparing thousands of government data sets to be searched, sifted and deployed in software applications. But Enigma is embarking on a sizable expansion, planning to nearly double its staff to 60 people by the end of the year. The growth will be fueled by a $28.2 million round of venture funding….
“The expansion will be mainly to pursue corporate business. Drew Conway, co-founder of DataKind, an organization that puts together volunteer teams of data scientists for humanitarian purposes, called Enigma ‘a first version of the potential commercialization of public data.’”
Other companies are getting into the game, too, leveraging open data in different ways. There’s Reonomy, which supplies research to the commercial real estate market. Seattle-based Socrata makes data-driven applications for government agencies. Information discovery company Dataminr uses open data in addition to Twitter’s stream to inform its clients’ decisions. Not surprisingly, Google is a contender with its Sidewalk Labs, which plumbs open data to improve city living through technology. Lohr insists, though, that Enigma is unique in the comprehensiveness of its data services. See the article for more on this innovative company.
Cynthia Murrell, July 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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