DataMarket.com is a startup out of Iceland. I have met with Hjalli a couple of times, spoken to him quite a bit and used DataMarket services on some of the presentations and have been following the company. The company started in June 2008 and Hjalli has been around the block in the startup journey a couple of times, he successfully created and sold a company in Iceland and I believe he is a 3rd time entrepreneur. You can read all about him in his blog, he has a distinct voice within the Icelandic startup culture and he is a big proponent of Transparency and DataMarket was way to address that issue. Although a lot of his opinion and comments are in Icelandic, so I glaze over them 🙂
Initially, I really felt that DataMarket’s business model was weak because you don’t see the light of the day if you are an intermediary for data and given the advent of new visualization technologies it is quite easy to hack a graph from structured data. The customers of data want data from reliable sources and you had to be a source of data to be able to sell data and typically people buy data from a Credible and Authentic Source like the IMF or the World Bank or The Economist etc. I believe the market for data is big but probably getting smaller with all the publishing tools out there. I could not put my fingers on the Value Proposition of DataMarket.
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