3 ms·

The things you could do with even a fraction of data at volume.

• adambratt 10y ago
  Exactly, it's really easy to look at the consumer value of 4sq and shrug them off without realizing their database has incredibly valuable data. Another similar company who is making a ton of money off data on the backend is Shazam.
  • mintplant 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on Shazam? Is it that they're selling data on who is listening to what?
    • adambratt 10y ago
      There's a great article on it that I'm struggling to find. But essentially, the Shazam app and related apps built on their tech are used as a massive A/B testing tool now by artists. Roll out 3 versions of the same song to 3 similar cities in the Midwest and see where it gets the most shazam lookups. If I recall correctly a few years back they were doing $100m a year by basically being able to give everyone in the music industry insight into what's the most popular and upcoming songs in every major city. However, with the popularity of Spotify I'm guessing they're losing a lot of market share in the mass music metrics space.
• caseysoftware 10y ago
  Some Capital One employees had the same thought and hijacked their data to make $4.4M over ~15 months: > "The SEC sued colleagues Nan Huang and Bonan Huang in January 2015 alleging they made hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword searches on their company's private database for sales data on at least 170 publicly traded companies from November 2013 to January 2015." Ref: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sec-capital-one-fin-insidertrading-idUSKCN0VZ2TW http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sec-capital-one-fin-inside... It seems like the biggest problem was misusing non-public Capital One data. Imagine if a personal finance app made that part of their business model and got scale. Something like Mint could front a powerful consumer investment strategy..