GeoIQ at The Data 2.0 Conference

GeoIQ  The Data 2.0 Conference

This past weekend I made it out to the Data 2.0 conference in San Francisco hosted by MidVentures. This conference was obviously high on my priorities list as I’m a self confessed data-nerd, and it was great to see so many other enthusiastic data nerds in one place talking about some of the difficult questions facing the data world.  The conference was well organized and perfectly timed with the Data.gov announcement. The conference was focused around 3 areas of data, where leadership is needed in the wake of a Data.gov shutdown:  Accessibility, Standardization, and Adaptability.

The Accessibility discussion was timely and heavily debated.  Mixed feelings on how this would impact open data and data accessibility were shared by many, as most organizations represented at Data2.0 used government data in one way or another.  No doubt they will continue to do so, the question remains, “where will they get access to that data?”

Data Standardization discussions were largely focused around APIs and allowing open access to data through an API.  Developers and the Data 2.0 audience were generally supportive of API access to the data. Very few organizations were however allowing full free access to the raw data they were creating.  Hopefully I got my message across during the conference on this topic: having an API doesn’t make it ‘Open’. I won’t get into this much further as Sean Gorman has already covered this topic in much more detail I would.

The most interesting announcement during Data 2.0, outside of our launch of GeoIQ Connect of course, was the Twitter / MediaSift partnership. Twitter, being the king of big data, looks like it has found a way to break down the firehose into usable chunks of data which can then be used by us data nerds at a reasonable price, and also helps to solve a common problem when working with Twitter data: data overload. Twitter is showing that it is adapting to the market, and monetizing on the amazing data stream they have created. This will definitely be a business model and a partnership to watch.