Datasets and Data-driven Startups

... What follows is our list of data sets that you might have a chance at building a business around. But first, let's look at some elements of the data-driven startup.

Why would you want to start a data-driven startup?

We are at the inception of a long term data renaissance. There are even data-focused VCs now.

Questions to ask yourself about a data-driven startup

• Are you solving a real problem?
• What are the inputs and what are the outputs?
• Does there seem to be a reasonable possibility to productize and create a business model?
• Is there an adequate sample of data available?
• Are there low hanging fruit for modeling?
• What is the license and is the dataset redistributable, i.e. usable for profit?
• Is the dataset ongoing and reliable, i.e. can you get feeds or periodic dumps that allow you to build a real product/system or can you only do one-off ad-hoc research projects?

There are number of open data sets available from web companies. Among the most exciting are relatively new data sources from Twitter, Yahoo, and Facebook.

Twitter offers the well-known firehose of tweets.

Yahoo also has a firehose, with real time stream access to delicious, flickr, last.fm, reviews, ratings, and comments.

Facebook has the new Graph API.

Read more.

(thanks to Anthony Goldbloom for a pointer to this article)