Advice for Open Data Startups

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-07-23

Summary:

"What follows is based on a short talk I gave at a workshop for open data startups in Uruguay that was organized by the World Bank’s Open Finances team. The reflections are all personal and don’t necessarily reflect the viewpoints of my employer. Let’s start with some definitions. We throw around terms like big data and open data without much specification of what they refer to and what they don’t. The best definition I’ve heard of 'big data' comes from Google’s Eric Schmidt: any dataset that’s too big for an Excel spreadsheet. Open data has a more precise definition, though it’s rare that a dataset labeled as 'open data' actually complies with the eight principles of open government data, which were established in 2007. More generally, we often use the term 'open data' as an all-encompassing label for information that comes from the government. And we tend to use 'big data' to describe information about the habits of customers of companies. For the open data startup, both open data and big data are valuable, and often in complementary ways. Nike+, a platform that permits over 8 million runners worldwide to share information about their runs, depends on open data to provide its users with information about the weather, how fast they run, and their elevation gain/loss. But the Nike+ platform also offers its users value by aggregating the information that they share. As a result, we’re able to see on a map the most popular running routes in every major city around the world ... And Nike gets to see which of their shoes are the fastest ...  You can also see the complementarity between open data and big data on Yelp, the largest restaurant directory in the United States. If we take a look at the profile page for Domo, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, we find a wealth of information to guide our decision about where to eat tonight. Some of the information comes from government records, such as whether or not it has wheelchair access (it does) and whether it has any health inspection violations (not since September 2011 when an inspector found moderate risk for vermin infestation.) But the vast majority of information on Yelp comes from the users themselves. They contribute and verify information about the restaurants’ operating hours, payment methods, noise levels, price range, and more. At Domo the Yelp community has left over 500 reviews. No one can read 500 reviews, but by selecting those terms that are mentioned most often, we learn right away which are the most popular dishes.  Cloudmade and Waze are other examples of startups that combine user data with government data to provide a superior product.  The most frequent mistake by open data startups is to assume that their readers want access to as much information as possible. I’ve seen many landing pages of open data startups that proudly boast that they have millions of records of information about some particular issue — as if anyone has the time or inclination to read through millions of pages of data.  Data is not knowledge. Knowledge is information with context that helps us make informed decisions. In our contemporary world, an over-abundance of information plus an over-abundance of choices has caused an unprecedented amount of anxiety. This is the basic message of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Your users don’t want more information, but they are willing to pay for the right knowledge at the right time to help inform their decisions in order to reduce their anxiety and gain a competitive advantage.  Let’s see how this framework applies to two very different open data startups, one a billion-dollar public company and the other a modest smartphone application that led to $50,000 of revenue in the first month it was developed ..."

Link:

http://davidsasaki.name/2013/07/advice-for-open-data-startups/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.psi oa.comment oa.crowd oa.tools oa.definitions oa.apps oa.zillow oa.yelp oa.cloudmade oa.waze oa.anti_mordidas oa.nike+ oa.government oa.data

Date tagged:

07/23/2013, 08:08

Date published:

07/23/2013, 04:08