Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation (Business Books)

chosen a simple and expansive definition of Open Data: it’s accessible public data that people, companies, and organizations can use to launch new ventures, analyze patterns and trends, make data-driven decisions, and solve complex problems. Others

“Our business clients save an average of $20 per line per month—meaning the average 25-line business saves around $6,000 per year through us. Scaled up, a 1,000-line, moderate-size company

So they used what is called Common Land Unit data that shows the location, shape, and size of all the farmed fields in the country. Even

Amazon service that pays people to do these kinds of “human intelligence tasks,” can attract more participants by paying more. But, significantly, higher payments don’t help increase accuracy. The nature of the task, and of the community engaged in

Each state has a different level of granularity with which they report it and a different update schedule. But, for example, we can tell you what every restaurant or hotel in the state of Texas’s revenues were for the month of March, location by location. That’s an enormously powerful indicator both macroeconomically as well as microeconomically.”

those focused on regulatory compliance (such as WebFilings and RR Donnelley), companies that republish data (Govini and Spikes Cavell), those that do analytics (Informatica, Esri, EMC, IBM, Oracle), and those that provide infrastructure (such as Socrata). With more

“computational social science.”

Now a new type of Open Data, called Smart Disclosure, is helping consumers navigate these confusing markets. And it’s providing new business opportunities for

but the company is working to automate the technology for large-scale application. The result, said Bookman, “could be dramatic.