Shout out to the real KnowItAll: Are you hiring?
by naisan on Apr.16, 2007, under SaaS, data aggregation, data mining, innovation, privacy
I’m convinced that the next wave is around taking the data that’s all around us, using machines to analyze it, and selling it back to the very people who created it in a way that gives them more value.
Recently came across the true KnowItAll’s who are working at the U of Washington. This group also is associated with some of the best next-wave thinking around how to pull off this type of endeavor.
So a shout out to Jason Maynard from Credit Suisse (who launched their OnDemand Index, and whom I think is one of the few analysts who really do have a good feel for what’s going on out there) with whom I had the conversation around creating or finding a company that took customer data from other OnDemand vendors, anonymized, aggregated, and analyzed it, then sold it back to those very customers.
The example: you get a SaaS company that has all kinds of information around their customers’ businesses: for instance how much sales pipeline per rep x y and z companies have. They ask their customers to opt-in for this service in exchange for their data being imported into the model. 50 customers sign up, and then you can tell all 50 how their pipeline per rep is compared to their peers.
There would be objections around privacy, but I think the KnowItAll’s have a solution for that, dating back to 2001!
What would make this even more interesting is to produce a taxonomy, or to allow the community to produce a taxonomy via open source methods, in order to take it further, and then to go across other companies.
So – if you’re out there reading this and know of a company that does this or wants to, drop me a line because I want to join that company!!!
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