DataMarket Offers a Big Data Marketplace for (open) Data Sets

DataMarket, from origin an Icelandic Big Data startup, is an open portal offering access to thousands of datasets from leading providers from around the world. They are aggregating enormous amounts of heterogeneous datasets that can help business users in their planning and decision-making. In total they have collected over 45.000 datasets worldwide and users can search them on their website. Their goal is to find data, make it accessible and understandable for everyone to use.

They started with international datasets in early 2011 and their core functionality has always been to search, visualize, compare and download open datasets. This service has always been for free and they offered as well a premium service with additional options and premium datasets from providers such as the Economist Intelligence Unit. Their datasets are very easy to explore and users can combine different datasets in order to gain more insight.

Recently, they have pivoted to a different business model however, with more focus on publishers than on subscribers. In October 2012 they started with a new paid service, the Data Delivery Engine. This is a white-label solution for organisations that want to share their data and offer a powerful search and visualization tool to its users on their own website. Customers include among others market research companies or financial data organisations such as the Yankee Group or LuxResearch.

A very interesting other feature is that it now allows publishers to upload their own data on DataMarket. They can do this for private use to test DataMarket’s systems or they can sell their data (or give it away for free) online (with or without a prominent branding on DataMarket). This is a powerful feature and in fact they have become a marketplace for datasets where anyone can upload and sell their data to anyone interested. This will allow users to combine open datasets with private datasets for cross analysis and pattern analysis to discover new trends and markets across the globe. Unfortunately, at the moment the system to upload any datasets is still rather rigid and hopefully this will change in the (near) future. Another issue might be how to address any privacy issues that may arise out of organisations selling their data on DataMarket. Not all data can be sold to anyone and it is unclear how DataMarket deals with this issue.

In 2010 they won the awards for Best Service and Information Website as well as Most Interesting Website. They have no patents (pending) at the moment. DataMarket offers a lot of potential, especially because of the call by Neelie Kroes to open public data for all in 2011. DataMarket allows organisations to join this movement and even make some money out of it. It looks like that their pivoting in 2012 proves to be a good one, but they will have to watch out for any privacy issues that could occur now that more and more consumers are becoming aware of their privacy. BigData-Startups therefore gives Datamarket a 6 bits rating.