NYU project touts 500 top open-data firms -- FCW

"Open-data evangelists like U.S. CTO Todd Park and his deputy, Nick Sinai, typically select from the same basket of name-brand companies -- think real estate firms Zillow and Trulia -- when touting the ability of government data to fuel for-profit enterprises. Now they have a bigger basket. The Governance Lab at New York University published on Dec. 17 its preliminary list of the Open Data 500 – an honor roll of businesses that tap into federal, state, local, and other data streams to build services. Sinai singled out the efforts of a firm called Climate Corporation, which made the Open Data 500. The company uses data from a variety of government sources -- NASA, NOAA, the Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Geological Survey -- to predict weather conditions in order to price crop insurance for hard-to-insure crops like blueberries. 'What's exciting is not what we're doing inside our government, but how the private sector is taking our data and creating all kinds of innovative things,' Sinai said. A recent McKinsey report estimated that $3 trillion in value could be unlocked through open data initiatives worldwide, with one-third of that coming thorough savings in procurement arising from better benchmarking, according to Michael Chui of the McKinsey Global Institute ..."