by Angela Guess
Judith Messina of Crain’s New York recently discussed how the Big Data revolution is creating more players in the data space. She writes, “Eighteen months ago, Jim Moran, co-founder of daily deal aggregator Yipit, started getting calls from daily deal sites interested in buying his data. They wanted to know how they were doing, compared with the competition. Mr. Moran declined, insisting that Yipit was a consumer business, not a data business. But when the calls persisted, he decided to experiment. It didn’t take long to figure out the value of Yipit’s data, a treasure trove of information about 800-plus daily deal sites and the tens of thousands of merchants who use them. Yipit knows not only who’s offering what deals, but also which deals are paying off. Today, analyzing and selling that data has become a healthy secondary business for Yipit, Mr. Moran says, although he won’t disclose the company’s revenues.”
Messina continues, “Big data—the collection, storage and analysis of the massive amounts of information being generated by the Internet and other sources—is becoming (you guessed it) a big business, and New York’s tech community a key player in it. In fact, New York’s whole ad-tech industry can be thought of as a big-data play, as ad-tech firms crunch millions of bits of information to figure out in real time what ad to serve to which set of eyes. Numerous other startups are using data to improve the customer experience in financial services, health care, retail and even education.”
