When studying economics, one issue I came up against was finding a good dataset to run of regressions on. For professionals and more serious researchers it’s still the same story; despite this being the era of big data, it’s still tough to dig through the web to find a quality dataset that fits your needs. We’ve covered Iceland’s Datamarket a few times in the past, who are solving this “home for datasets” problem, and have been successful in pulling in, maintaining, and normalizing data from public and private sources like World Bank, Eurostat, and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
The company first started charging end-users for the use of datasets, but interestingly turned that around in 2012 by charging data providers to publish and sell their data through their platform. Their business model isn’t worth talking too much now, however, as the company now announces they’ve been by Qlik, a Sweden-founded and U.S. based Business Intelligence vendor that provides self-discovery tools and visualizations to make anyone in an organization build a story out of data.
“We are not disclosing a lot about our joint plans at this time, but I’ll still say that we see some very interesting opportunities in bringing together Qlik’s superb analytics products, with DataMarket’s unique abilities to pull in, maintain and normalize data from a vast range of 3rd party sources – all in an effort to fulfill the Qlik vision of simplifying decisions for everyone, everywhere,” Hjalmar Gislason, founder and CEO of DataMarket writes on the Qlik blog.
As we continue to evolve in Iceland and build a vibrant startup community, I sure hope these successful entrepreneurs invest into building the community. I am really happy to see that Hjalmar [Gislason] has done just that,” Bala Kamallakharan writes on the Startup Iceland blog, pointing out that Gislason has invested into a new media and publishing comapany called Kjarninn.
