#data2summit « karmadata

Founded by Sean Power, previous founder of Infinata (BioPharm Insight®), karmadata curates and provides access to a linked version of the world’s open data sources in Healthcare, Legal, Energy, and other verticals.

BOSTON, May 7, 2012 – karmadata officially introduced its freemium website (www.karmadata.com) and API (www.karmadata.com/API) to the global data community at the Data 2.0 Summit, held April 30th in San Francisco. karmadata’s website enables users to find, visualize and share data of interest to them and their social networks. The karmadata API provides standardized linked data from the world’s data sources, allowing developers to design and build their own applications.

“The Data 2.0 Summit (www.data2x.com) was the perfect arena for us to announce our launch amongst so many creative and like minded leaders in the data industry. Our website will reinvent how professionals access and analyze data, providing access to 10s of millions of users that are blocked by proprietary corporate-only license fee models. Additionally, our API will provide simple, affordable access to standardized, linked data for app developers and system integrators to create things we couldn’t possibly dream of,” said Sean Power founder and CEO of karmadata.

karmadata was chosen as one of the top 5 data startups of 2013 to present during the Data 2.0 Summit. “karmadata’s vision and technology platform fit our 2013 conference theme of ‘Democratizing Data’ perfectly. We welcome their entrance and look forward to their disruptive activities in the business information space,” said Geoff Domoracki, co-founder of Data 2.0.

karmadata poised to disrupt the Professional Business and Information Services Industry

The current Professional Business and Information Services industry is a $100 billion + market, dominated by a handful of Big Information Vendors which utilize a corporate-only, up-front licensing model. This archaic standard effectively locks out tens of millions of would-be users and application developers who generally cannot afford the upfront costs of access. karmadata is utilizing innovative technology and cloud based scale, enabling a first-in-kind freemium pricing model for industry data.

How karmadata works

On a daily basis, karmadata processes high value open data sources, such as: PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System, the USPTO databases, and many others. These sources are primarily semi-structured text or XML that are not linked to each other, and provide no standards for querying, analyzing or visualizing. We have processed over 100 million records to date, and have identified over 6.1 million Entities that are healthcare providers, populated places, clinical investigators, diseases, organizations, drugs and more.

karmadata visitors can create “Datacards”©, which are meant to be mini-blogs, telling a data-driven and visualized story that is personal for the author. These Datacards can be easily shared on social media, third-party websites or embedded in blogs or articles on the web. Additionally, each of our 6.1 million Entities has its own Poster, with visualizations and an index to all the world’s data where that person, place, organization, product or thing can be found.

About karmadata

karmadata is on a mission to standardize and link the world’s data and to provide easy affordable access to it, to anyone, anywhere in the world. karmadata is currently a small and enterprising team of dedicated and experienced professionals with a common goal of redefining the industry standards of how data will be resourced, collated and shared among industry professionals and setting the gold standard for future data providers.

Currently seeking partnerships and investors

karmadata is actively recruiting investment, data provider and technology partnerships. For more information please contact Sean Power (media@karmadata.com)

9:15am: Opening Keynote by James Strittholt

James Strittholt delivers the keynote at Data2.0 Summit on Climate Change through GEO data. James provided an amazing live demo of DataBasin.org in which he visualized the effects of climate change via interactive and configurable maps in realtime with high quality data.

9:50am: Heard a great quote

“90% of the world’s data has been added in the last two years”

10am: PANEL: From Climate Data To Technology Solutions

Great discussion by the panel and was very impressed by Daniel Goldfarb, Partner, Director of Design Research, Greenstart who provided great insights in the current data inustry. Below are a few quotes by Daniel:

“The amount of ‘dashboard’ startups we see is staggering, but simply having a lot of data is not a business model. There’s a need for actionable end points for data driven decision making.”

“Gamification is the worst word in our industry. It doesn’t do anything in most cases.”

“Did you know that some of the small utility companies contract outside firms to retrieve email address of their own customers?”

A great question posed by Daniel Goldfarb: “Which car type do you think will be more prevalent in the next five years, EV or Self Driving cars?”

10:50am: PANEL: Data Science and Algorithms-as-a-Service
With a QA format, I’ve found it easier to jot down the best answers heard during the panel. Data is heavy but algorithms are light. Best strategy to address this difference is to place the algorithm where the data lives. A new strategy is to “burn” the model (IF THEN statements) into the chips themselves. Do you think data as service replaces data scientists? Absolutely not. How to use data successfully and what questions to ask become very important. There are many companies and organizations out there who don’t know they have data problems.

Algorithmia: Interesting startup that provides a marketplace for connecting algorithm developers with companies needing solutions.

12pm: Crowdsourcing the Oct Dataweek conference
During lunch the lead organizers of Data2.0 asked all of us to suggest topics we’d like to be covered at the next Data2.0 conference. Of the ideas suggested, then voted on by everyone, Data Predictability was at the top of the list.

12:30pm: Disqus demo of Gravity

12:40pm: Fibit demo’d their latest product, app and API
Fitbit API can be reviewed here

3:20pm: PANEL: Democratizing Data: A business, technology, and society problem
How do we democratize the power of data? On the question of what are the inhibiters to democratizing data, Bruno Aziza from SiSense provided fantastic insights. Bruno outlined a few top inhibiters:

Price: It’s currently too high a price to gain access to the data
There’s an imbalance with the cost of storage versus crunching the data. It currently costs $1M to crunch 1TB of data versus the very cheap costs to store it.
Although complex, we shouldn’t take an elitist closed approach to analyzing data. We should enable the consumer to analyze on their own without the need for experts.

Diego Oppenheimer from Microsoft touched upon the need for education to the consumer. With the increase of easy to use tools being created, how do we reduce the risk of incorrect conclusions made by the user.

On the question of how can we make users more data savvy, Diego pointed out that the issue starts with the fact that data is not clean and thus un-appealing to users to even get started. Diego mentioned that Microsoft has taken a visual and explorer approach with their Data Explorer product offering.

4:10pm Top 5 Startup Pitch Event
Out of 20 startup applicants across the country, karmadata was chosen along with 4 other startups to present during the Startup Pitch event. The other startups include Algorithms.io, MarkedUp, Vertascale and Virtue. You can read about them here.

Sean Power presenting at #data2summit #startup pitch event.

4:50pm PANEL: Big Friendly Data: Making Big Data Accessible to Non-wizards
How much of their own data is the average organization using? Only 15%. Organizations today can improve their use of data by simply taking a closer look at their own data.

What is the holy grail? It’s being able to take any business problem, use the data you already have and work with your current resources/team to reduce the amount of time to market (within 30days).

5:20pm: Top Startup Announced
Algorithmia.io was selected as the top startup.