Most open data — data that’s free to use, reuse, and redistribute — is public information that governments publish as a key part of “transparency” initiatives. It can be a boon to information services already skilled in curating and adding value to public information, though these companies often struggle with
Recently, CrowdFlower blogged about de-duplicating records in a merged CRM database using crowdsourcing. The article suggested that this kind of data is often too wildly divergent to be de-duped automatically. At IEI, we’ve found: Most CRM data is similar (first name, last name, email, phone, etc.) and easy to standardize
Heat maps—data represented graphically with individual values represented by colors—are an increasingly popular way to quickly convey a lot of information. To demonstrate this, we at IEI recently used a set of data on private investments made in the U.S. thus far in 2013 (data courtesy of our friends at
Information services are just that: services. Even if you call your customers subscribers and deliver your product to them by mail, in the end you’re performing a service on a regular basis in exchange for regular payments. You’ve crossed the boundary between products and services even further if you’d be
On November 20th, 2013, Ian Greenleigh, social media and content strategist and author of The Social Media Side Door, addressed an audience of Austin businesspeople, students, and academics at the UT iSchool for the inaugural SIIA INFO Local: Austin event. IEI’s Matt Manning chatting with Ian Greenleigh before the presentation.
The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) INFO Local: Austin chapter is excited to join Boston, London, San Francisco, and others in offering informative networking events to their thriving technology, media, publishing, and information service communities. Information Evolution’s own Matt Manning is one of the founding members of the local
This tool from Crowd Computing Systems automates crowdsourcing projects. We use it at IEI to run campaigns on the Amazon Mechanical Turk, the world’s largest crowdsourcing platform. (More on WorkFusion.) We use WorkFusion for a variety of processes. It works for simple, low-end tasks such as appending URLs, email addresses,
The 2013 DataContent conference just wrapped up yesterday and, once again, it offered outstanding insight into the innovation going on in our industry. Here are my favorite highlights from the show: RetailNext: Founded by some ex-Cisco engineers in 2007 these folks use heat sensors in retail shops to track traffic
Here are a few of my favorite moments from the DataContent 2013 conference, which was, as always, a unique opportunity to learn more about what’s going on in our industry. Marketing Subscription Data Services bootcamp—Russell Perkins and Minal Bopaiah did a great job of giving us a lot of interesting,
At the DataContent 2013 conference, I will be a member of a panel discussing the tools being used in the information business to make our products richer, drive our costs lower, and keep our products updated in real time. When our firms can accomplish these three goals, our businesses are
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