"data economy" entries

Governments looking for economic ROI must focus on open data with business value

Harvey Lewis shares insights from Deloitte UK's research on the open data economy.

There’s increasing interest in the open data economy from the research wings of consulting firms. Capgemini Consulting just published a new report on the open data economy. McKinsey’s Global Institute is following up its research on big data with an inquiry into open data and government innovation. Deloitte has been taking a long look at open data business models. Forrester says open data isn’t (just) for governments anymore and says more research is coming. If Bain & Company doesn’t update its work on “data as an asset” this year to meet inbound interest in open data from the public sector, it may well find itself in the unusual position of lagging the market for intellectual expertise.

As Radar readers know, I’ve been trying to “make dollars and sense” of the open data economy since December, looking at investments, business models and entrepreneurs.

harvey_lewisIn January, I interviewed Harvey Lewis, the research director for the analytics department of Deloitte U.K. Lewis, who holds a doctorate in hypersonic aerodynamics, has been working for nearly 20 years on projects in the public sector, defense industry and national security. Today, he’s responsible for applying an analytical eye to consumer businesses, manufacturing, banking, insurance and the public sector. Over the past year, his team has been examining the impact of open data releases on the economy of the United Kingdom. The British government’s embrace of open data makes such research timely. Read more…

Personal data ownership drives market transparency and empowers consumers

The White House added a community for the "smart disclosure" of consumer data to Data.gov.

On Monday morning, the Obama administration launched a new community focused on consumer data at Data.gov. While there was no new data to be found among the 507 datasets listed there, it was the first time that smart disclosure has an official home in federal government.

Data.gov consumer slide apps image

Image via Data.gov.

“Smart disclosure means transparent, plain language, comprehensive, synthesis and analysis of data that helps consumers make better-informed decisions,” said Christopher Meyer, the vice president for external affairs and information services at Consumers Union, the nonprofit that publishes “Consumer Reports,” in an interview. “The Obama administration deserves credit for championing agency disclosure of data sets and pulling it together into one web site. The best outcome will be widespread consumer use of the tools — and that remains to be seen.”

You can find the new community at Consumer.Data.gov or data.gov/consumer. Both URLs forward visitors to the same landing page, where they can explore the data, past challenges, external resources on the topic, in addition to a page about smart disclosure, blog posts, forums and feedback.

“Analyzing data and giving plain language understanding of that data to consumers is a critical part of what Consumer Reports does,” said Meyer. “Having hundreds of data sets available on one (hopefully) easy-to-use platform will enable us to provide even more useful information to consumers at a time when family budgets are tight and health care and financial ‘choices” have never been more plentiful.”

Read more…

Investing in the open data economy

Open Data Institute CEO Gavin Starks on how open data's current state is similar to the World Wide Web's early days.

If you had 10 million pounds to spend on open data research, development and startups, what would you do with it? That’s precisely the opportunity that Gavin Starks (@AgentGav) has been given as the first CEO of the Open Data Institute (ODI) in the United Kingdom.

GavinStarksThe ODI, which officially opened last September, was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt. The independent, non-partisan, “limited by guarantee” nonprofit is a hybrid institution focused on unlocking the value in open data by incubating startups, advising governments, and educating students and media.

Previously, Starks was the founder and chairman of AMEE, a social enterprise that scored environmental costs and risks for businesses. (O’Reilly’s AlphaTech Ventures was one of its funders.) He’s also worked in the arts, science and technology. I spoke to Starks about the work of the ODI and open data earlier this winter as part of our continuing series investigating the open data economy.

What have you accomplished to date?

Gavin Starks: We opened our offices on the first of October last year. Over the first 12 weeks of operation, we’ve had a phenomenal run. The ODI is looking to create value to help everyone address some of the greatest challenges of our time, whether that’s in education, health, in our economy or to benefit our environment.

Since October, we’ve had literally hundreds of people through the door. We’ve secured $750,000 in matched funding from the Omidyar Network, on top of a 10-million-pound investment from the UK Government’s Technology Strategy Board. We’ve helped identify 200 million pounds a year in savings for the health service in the UK. Read more…

Open data economy: Eight business models for open data and insight from Deloitte UK

Two open data items of note from readers.

When I asked whether the push to free up government data was resulting in economic activity and startup creation, I started to receive emails from people around the United States and Europe. I’ll be publishing more of what I learned in our ongoing series of open data interviews and profiles over the next month, but two responses are worth sharing now.

Open questions about open growth

The first response concerned Deloitte’s ongoing research into open data in the United Kingdom [PDF], conducted in collaboration with the Open Data Institute.

Harvey Lewis, one of the primary investigators for the research project, recently wrote about some of Deloitte’s preliminary findings at the Open Government Partnership’s blog in a post on “open growth.” To date, Deloitte has not found the quantitative evidence the team needs to definitely demonstrate the economic value of open data. That said, the team found much of interest in the space: Read more…

Making open data more valuable, one micropayment at a time

Yo Yoshida's startup, Appallicious, is using San Francisco's government data as a backbone.

When it comes to making sense of the open data economy, tracking cents is valuable. In San Francisco, where Mayor Ed Lee’s administration has reinvigorated city efforts to release open data for economic benefits, entrepreneur Yo Yoshida has made the City by the Bay’s government data central to his mobile ecommerce startup, Appallicious.

Appallicious is positioning its Skipitt mobile platform as a way for cities to easily process mobile transactions for their residents. The startup is generating revenue from each transaction the city takes with its platform using micropayments, a strategy that’s novel in the world of open data but has enabled Appallicious to make enough money to hire more employees and look to expand to other municipalities. I spoke to Yoshida last fall about his startup, what it’s like to go through city procurement, and whether he sees a market opportunity in more open government data.

Where did the idea for Appallicious come from?

Yo Yoshida: About three years ago, I was working on another platform with a friend that I met years ago, working on a company called Beaker. We discovered a number of problems. One of them was being able to find our way around San Francisco and not only get information, but be able to transact with different services and facilities, including going to a football game at the 49ers stadium. Why couldn’t we order a beer to our seats or order merchandise? Or find the food trucks that were sitting in some of the parks and then place an order from that?

So we were looking at what solutions were out there via mobile. We started exploring how to go about doing this. We looked first at the vendors and approaching them. That’s been done with a lot of other specific verticals. We started talking to the city a little bit. We looked at the open data legislation that was coming out at that time and said, “This is the information we need, but now we also need to be able to figure out how to monetize and populate that.” Read more…

Making dollars and sense of the open data economy

Is the push to free up government data resulting in economic activity and startup creation?

Open dataOver the past several years, I’ve been writing about how government data is moving into the marketplaces, underpinning ideas, products and services. Open government data and application programming interfaces to distribute it, more commonly known as APIs, increasingly look like fundamental public infrastructure for digital government in the 21st century.

What I’m looking for now is more examples of startups and businesses that have been created using open data or that would not be able to continue operations without it. If big data is a strategic resource, it’s important to understand how and where organizations are using it for public good, civic utility and economic benefit.

Sometimes government data has been proactively released, like the federal government’s work to revolutionize the health care industry by making health data as useful as weather data or New York City’s approach to becoming a data platform.

In other cases, startups like Panjiva or BrightScope have liberated government data through Freedom of Information Act requests and automated means. By doing so, they’ve helped the American people and global customers understand the supply chain, the fees associated with 401(k) plans and the history of financial advisors.

I’ve hypothesized that open data will have an overall effect on the economy akin to that of open source and small business. Gartner’s research has posited that open data creates value in the public and private sector. If government acts as a platform to enable people inside and outside government to innovate on top of it, what are the outcomes? Read more…

Panjiva uses government data to build a global search engine for commerce

Successful startups look to solve a problem first, then look for the datasets they need.

“If you go back to how we got started,” mused Josh Green, “government data really is at the heart of that story.” Green, who co-founded Panjiva with Jim Psota in 2006, was demonstrating the newest version of Panjiva.com to me over the web, thinking back to the startup’s origins in Cambridge, Mass.

At first blush, the search engine for products, suppliers and shipping services didn’t have a clear connection to the open data movement I’d been chronicling over the past several years. His account of the back story of the startup is a case study that aspiring civic entrepreneurs, Congress and the White House should take to heart.

“I think there are a lot of entrepreneurs who start with datasets,” said Green, “but it’s hard to start with datasets and build business. You’re better off starting with a problem that needs to be solved and then going hunting for the data that will solve it. That’s the experience I had.”

The problem that the founders of Panjiva wanted to help address was one that many other entrepreneurs face: how do you connect with companies in far away places? Green came to the realization that a better solution was needed in the same way that many people who come up with an innovative idea do: he had a frustrating experience and wanted to scratch his own itch. When he was working at an electronics company earlier in his career, his boss asked him to find a supplier they could do business with in China.

“I thought I could do that, but I was stunned by the lack of reliable information,” said Green. “At that moment, I realized we were talking about a problem that should be solvable. At a time when people are interested in doing business globally, there should be reliable sources of information. So, let’s build that.”

Today, Panjiva has created a higher tech way to find overseas suppliers. The way they built it, however, deserves more attention.

Read more…

San Francisco looks to tap into the open data economy

With revised legislation and a chief data officer, San Francisco is iterating on its platform goals.

As interest in open data continues to grow around the world, cities have become laboratories for participatory democracy. They’re also ground zero for new experiments in spawning civic startups that deliver city services or enable new relationships between the people and city government. San Francisco was one of the first municipalities in the United States to embrace the city as a platform paradigm in 2009, with the launch of an open data platform.

Years later, the city government is pushing to use its open data to accelerate economic development. On Monday, San Francisco announced revised open data legislation to enable that change and highlighted civic entrepreneurs who are putting the city’s data to work in new mobile apps.

City staff have already published the revised open data legislation on GitHub. (If other cities want to “fork” it, clone away.) David Chiu, the chairman of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city’s legislative body, introduced the new version on Monday and submitted it on Tuesday. A vote is expected before the end of the year.

Speaking at the offices of the Hatchery in San Francisco, Chiu observed that, by and large, the data that San Francisco has put out showed the city in a positive light. In the future, he suggested, that should change. Chiu challenged the city and the smartest citizens of San Francisco to release more data, figure out where the city could take risks, be more entrepreneurial and use data to hold the city accountable. In his remarks, he said that San Francisco is working on open budgeting but is still months away from getting the data that they need. Read more…