Procured Data Feed Promises To Be ‘Disruptive,’ 1010data Says

Customers normally bring their own data when they buy or subscribe to a data analytics software or service. But with the new 1010data Facts offering unveiled today, customers not only get advanced analytic tooling, but they can get access to a variety of data feeds, including some proprietary sources that the CEO of 1010data promises to be disruptive.

The new 1010data Facts offering is a data exchange of sorts. On the one hand, it provides companies with access to a variety of data sets, but it also provides a way for the generators of data to sell their data.

There are three broad categories of data that 1010data is selling:

• Public sources, like those from the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Census, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration;
• Third-party data, such as from credit reporting agencies, property and loan information providers, and home price providers;
• Disruptive data, which are proprietary data sets that could include US and Canadian card transactions, e-commerce purchases, gas prices, and building permits.

The information is quite granular and useful to particular clients, particularly those in the retail and financial services industries. But the data sets are aggregated and anonymized to protect privacy and security.

1010data is not disclosing the exact sources of third-party and proprietary data sets, except to say that it’s not your run-of-the-mill data sets that are commonly available from third-party data brokers. “This is data that people don’t have easy access to,” says 1010data co-founder and CEO Sandy Steier.

1010data has been providing a limited supply of curated data for some time, but only for certain clients as an add-on for its hosted analytics service, which is based on a distributed, columnar database that Steier and his fellow co-founder Joel Kaplan developed decades ago while working on Wall Street.

“This is something we recognized way back when we began the service. We have been doing this on a limited basis for a long time,” Steier says. “But instead of buying that data and putting it in to 1010data, it’s handy for the customer if the data is already there….You have to subscribe. But from a mechanical perspective, it’s just there, preloaded.”

Like any data set, the cleanliness of the 1010data Facts data varies by source. Some of it may be pristine, while others may have quality issues. “People who know data know it’s a rare data set that is clean,” Steier says. “If a data set is incredibly dirty, then we will tend to fix it up….We don’t want to include our own biases and mistakes, but we do want to make it usable. Some of it is quite good and quite clean.”

In addition to providing data to coampnies, the 1010data Facts can serve as an exchange, if you will, for organizations that generate data but don’t have a good way to bring it to market. Steier didn’t want to disclose some of these sources, citing confidentiality agreements with the data sources. But he did say that many of them are tech companies that aren’t in the data broker business.

“They either don’t know how to sell it, or they don’t have the time or bandwidth to sell it,” he says. “A company that’s been in business for some time, their focus maybe on building out their user community, or making their website particularly good. But they’re also collecting this information, and our proposition can be, ‘Hey we can take this information, and you get a cut.'”

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