Report from Data 2.0 (KDnuggets Exclusive)

Data 2.0 conference was held on Apr 4 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. This was the first conference to examine the growing importance of information accessibility in business, technology and society. The conference focused on three main themes of Data 2.0:

• Accessibility The relevant underlying data is accessible via open API or a paid license
• Standardization Owners of the underlying data integrate a shared schema or taxonomy, or a 3rd party aggregates the source data using a data standard
• Adaptability Web 2.0 let people connect in new ways. Data 2.0 lets websites talk to each other and exchange data using new adaptive protocols

Important Events:

• Twitter and realtime data curation service Mediasift have just announced a data resell partnership here at the Data 2.0 Conference at the Mission Bay Conference Center.
• $3 million Heritage Health Prize was launched. Following in the footsteps of the Netflix prize, the Heritage Health Prize is the world's largest predictive modeling contest, which crowdsources data analysis to find the best solution to a big problem. The Healthcare Provider Network (HPN) is sponsoring the prize with one goal in mind: to develop a breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.  The data contest will be hosted on Kaggle.
• The top 5 pitches from the Data 2.0 Pitch were invited to pitch on stage to 800+ attendees, alongside speakers from Google, Microsoft, Factual, SimpleGeo and Palantir at the Data 2.0 Conference. Last week, 25 selected applicants presented to a "group of peers and investors" at the Data 2.0 Pitch Day. From that crop of startups, these five made it past the judges.

• Micello, billed as the "Google Maps for the indoors," offers indoor maps for a malls, plazas, stadiums, airports, conference centers and any variety of buildings. The site has maps for more than 4,000 places in the U.S., Japan and Singapore and offers APIs to create services on top of its data. The company launched at DEMO 2009.

• Mashape is "your place to easily build, distribute and hack badass APIs." The service provides a central directory of APIs, as well as simplifies the ability to generate a simple, ready-to-use API and add it to a marketplace. The company launched November 2010.

• PlantSense "brings sensors and simplified web technology together to help home gardeners grow flourishing fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees and shrubs." The company has worked with Black & Decker over the last year to sell sensors to consumers. These sensors detect environmental and soil conditions, correlate that with plant type, and make recommendations on how to better help the plant to grow. Plantsense launched in 2006 and has raised two rounds of funding since.

• Min.us calls itself "the simplest and easiest way to share" and, indeed, when the service launched last November, RWW wrote that it made sharing "as easy as a quick drag and drop." Min.us has moved being simply sharing on the Web to becoming multi platform, working not only on Mac, Windows and Linux, but also Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7 and with an extension on both Firefox and Chrome.

The winner of Data 2.0's Startup Pitch, and receiver of one handshake, was Micello. Said the judges, they chose Micello both for its potential for real-world use cases and its ability to go hyperlocal.

Relevant links

• midventures.com/2011/02/08/worlds-largest-data-contest-3-million-heritage-health-prize-to-launch-at-the-data-2-0-conference/
• blog.infochimps.com/2011/04/04/overview-of-vivek-wadhwas-data-2-0-talk-the-new-information-age/
• techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/twitter-and-mediasift-announce-partnership/
• www.readwriteweb.com/archives/meet_the_5_finalists_of_the_data_20_startup_pitch.php

Comments:

Gregory Piatetsky
How is this social / big data tech bubble different from year 2000 dot com bubble?