Dateline: March 8, 2013
Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.
Recently I picked up a Businessweek from November and found an interesting article about data bartering. The article is titled Bartering: Swapping Data Like Baseball Cards. In the article the authors describe how companies are finding hidden value in their data by exchanging data “like baseball cards, with no money changing hands.”
App makers are pursuing all manner of targeted consumer data—from restaurant ratings to store hours—but it’s often expensive to acquire. Data swapping can be a win-win if both sides have complementary proprietary research.
The article continues,
A market for data swaps is rapidly emerging. Factual, a Los Angeles-based startup, has put together a database that houses location data and details on retailers and restaurants. Access to the database costs companies money, but they can accrue discounts by agreeing to contribute some of their own information.
Waze, a California start up with a mobile mapping app in South America offered resellers of geographic mapping information access to the database of automobile traffic, speed traps, roadwork and collisions his company would collect from the new South American users of it’s app.
Clearly data bartering is not the right path for customer data, but customer data is just a portion of the large data warehouses companies manage.
What data in your data warehouse would you be willing to barter? Who might have a complementary database that might be willing to trade with your company?
That’s a WRAP! Have a wonderful weekend.
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