Through SaveLoveGive.com, consumers give Validas permission to access data from their phone bills, and Validas gives consumers guidance on how to save money—which the website encourages users to donate to charity.

The second was what’s being called data discovery—the ability to search about a topic you’re interested in and discover data that you didn’t know you needed.

Bluefin Labs monitors

Mastodon C has just done a government-funded analysis of variations in prescribing patterns across the United Kingdom, finding areas where expensive drugs are being prescribed for no apparent reason when generics would work as well.

Castlight Health, which was cofounded by Todd Park before he joined the government, has helped businesses reduce their overall healthcare costs by about 10 percent. I visited

His iconic example was a federal website that cost $181 million to build—$81 million more than the new initiative to map the human brain—and that was built, ironically enough, to catalog databases on government contracts.

The best of the sites achieved less than 50 percent customer satisfaction. Equally disturbing, the sites’ recommendations varied greatly when the same consumer went to several of them with the same search criteria for car insurance, which the magazine used as a test. Two of the sites offered quotes from only about 10

More than 80 million Americans now have access to their health records via Blue Button.

It’s tempting to structure choice engines to promote companies that pay more for leads or provide more revenue through advertising.