Infochimps, a marketplace for data sets, is announcing the acquisition of Y Combinator-incubated startup and competitor Data Marketplace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we understand it was an all-cash deal.
As we wrote in our initial review of Data Marketplace earlier this year, the startup served as a middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users could submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format. → Read More
There has always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet format) and hard to find in a Google search. An finding the data, and then putting the data into a format that is easy to digest can be a laborious task. Y Combinator’s Data Marketplace is hoping to change this by providing a platform where financial professionals can request data sets and then data aggregators/consultants can then find and format the appropriate data.
Founded by two former analysts at investment banks, Data Marketplace is essentially the middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users can submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format. → Read More