DataMarket Helps You Find Important Figures
Datamarket is a new Icelandic startup that has just launched their service - a website that gives people access to structured data from private and public data sources. At the moment, they have data only available from Iceland, but they are looking to expand to other countries and areas as well. They have 6 employees and the company was founded in June 2008. The service took 18 months of development before they were able to launch.
The service is now live with a reasonably good amount of data. DataMarket claims to have 7 million timeseries of different data that they can now capitalise on. DataMarket has three different price structures at the moment. The obvious one is the free usage where you can get used to the service itself, the tools and even export the data. The premium model is 59€ a month where you get a lot more possibilities to personalise the data and have access to scheduled e-mail reports as well as image exports and the chance to connect your Excel to live data. The last offering they have is the possibility to have API access to their data servers. These are priced per API requests per month.
At the moment, DataMarket may not seem to have a lot of different use cases but if you think about it - it comes in handy almost equally much as Wikipedia. You need to check that figure to support your sales package for example - figures which are hard to get from Wikipedia itself. At the moment, with the Icelandic dataset they might not gain a lot of traction in Europe. However, they can build and finetune the service with the early users in Iceland and reap on that knowledge once they expand to Europe and other countries outside Iceland.
Share to help us grow the ArcticStartup community!
Interesting. I wonder how DataMarket compare to Wolfram Alpha and if they offer powerful data manipulation in the style of Dabble DB?
Cheers, Jussi
A very interesting service, reminds me directly of the problem that Hans Rosling presented in TEDtalks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w) about the lack of data aggregation between different countries and organizations.
What I am left to wonder is whether or not the revenue model of monthly subscriptions, especially considering the relatively high price level for individuals will be sustainable. The pricing could in my view be successful with companies, but a separate pricing scheme for consumers / individuals could become handy.
Thanks for the blog post guys!
Jussi: I'm a huge fan of Wolfram Alpha. Their database and what they've got running on the back-end is awesome. Our approach is somewhat different. First of all, we're not aiming for any sort of processing or calculations, but on visual data exploration and delivering custom slices and mix of data sets as raw data (through export or API).
Secondly - as the name implies - we're building a "data market", mixing premium data with public data. Access to any public and open data is still open and free through us, the data is just easier to find and use. Users will however also find data such as market research, analyst forecasts, financial market data and more that is only accessible to them if they're subscribed to the data sets in question.
Sampo: Admittedly Rosling's original TED talk was one of the main inspirations for founding DataMarket.
Our product is primarily aimed at specialists and managers within companies and public organizations, and priced in a way that should make it easy for them to rationalize the subscription. We also believe that the sales of premium data and API access will prove to be significant revenue sources on top of the subscriptions.
The subscription features are largely aimed at business use. Individuals can use DataMarket for most of their needs, free of charge. We might very well introduce a lower priced package aimed more at the consumer market at some point. And we'll definitely want to find a way to address students and the academy ... more on that later.
Wow this is a great resource.. I’m enjoying it.. good article