Quandl the Trailblazer of Useable Data Democratization

While I will do my best to explain Quandl as follows, feel free to just bypass my analysis and visit www.quandl.com and perhaps sign up for Quandl. Prepare yourself to be delighted; if you appreciate Wikipedia you will immediately figure out what Quandl is all about when you visit the site, no further explanation necessary.  On to the analysis:

Right now in the Data Economy the data democratization subject swarms the news in one form or another, from the NSA Surveillance controversy, to the Data Act and the entire notion of an open data policy by governments.  And data security problems persist at some of the largest data generators and aggregators on the planet, from Facebook to credit bureaus, ironically some of the for-profit organizations that should take as much care to secure data as governments.  Want to know why security stocks have run ahead of the S&P 500 by over 50%?  Look no further than the ongoing tales of woe regarding data leaks.

In the midst of all this wringing of hands about data democratization comes so far little Quandl.  The brainchild of CEO and founder Tammer Kamel, a University of Waterloo graduate who previously had consulted on and developed data-driven analytics hedge fund solutions, Quandl aims to be the YouTube or Wikipedia of open data. Or from another angle, with so much of software going open source, why not data?  Quandl was originally going to be named WikiPosit, but for those of you who have attempted to acquire URLs, you could guess as to the reason why Quandl is Quandl.

Thus far leaning on seed money from self, family, friends, and a few angels (heads-up VCs, Quandl is looking for Series A), the very young Quandl has already established access to over 6 million “free” datasets.  I use the term “free” loosely, for while all that open data Quandl has accumulated is free to you, it was never truly free; taxpayers pay for “free” data created by the public sector, and customers pay for “free” data made available by for-profits.  But if the data is, shall we say prepaid rather than free, Quandl wants to make it available to all comers.  More importantly Quandl wants to make all that public data interoperable.

In addition to all the legwork required to find and aggregate all the publicly available data, Quandl is developing APIs for some of the datasets, and offers access to the data through languages like Python, data gnashing tools like Excel, open source statistical language R, and other tools.  Here is a fantastic, detailed description of how to use Quandl datasets with BigML.  BigML offers a uniquely simple approach to grasping the power of and implementing Machine Learning.

Interested VCs may already be thinking something like, “But how does Quandl plan to monetize all this data and interoperability thereof?”  While that profit goal remains something of a work-in-progress, one idea is to offer a premium service, perhaps with analytics tools, or to become a private data reseller using the Quandl data-as-a-service platform.  I found it heartening that Quandl’s knee jerk response to the monetization question was not “sell ads.”

But right now Quandl is focused on running as fast as it able to become the authoritative source for open data, including the data discovery work, curating the data, continually innovating the data interoperability, and enhancing the front-end web site.  Quandl has also begun a search for partners – it is easy to imagine big data vendors like Alteryx and Datameer who both offer galleries of free analytics tapping into Quandl.

Commercial data-as-a-service providers like Acxiom, Interactive Data, LexisNexis, Thompson Reuters,  and Zyme Solutions, and a long list of data exchanges have built their vertically-oriented data businesses by accumulating rafts of private data, curating that data, and then offering the data to customers through a variety of techniques, from simple batch feeds to advanced analytics.  Quandl aims to join that list using a similar model, but the vertical Quandl is focusing on is “open.”