In a post last month I wrote about Powerset COO Steve Newcomb’s use of predictive modeling to guess early growth rates so that they have enough hardware to scale. Good for them, I said, for releasing some of the data publicly. And I recommended they go one step further and release the predictive models themselves:
Powerset should publish the model itself (without the specific Powerset assumptions of course) and let other startups tweak it for their own use. Most new companies don’t have the excel jockeys or the time to do this kind of work. Any competitive issues would be overshadowed by the considerable goodwill (and link juice) they’d get from doing this.
And that’s exactly what they are going to do. Newcomb says they’ll release the models in the next few weeks, minus Powerset-specific data. Don’t expect to see these on Google Docs, though (a perfect place to dump them, except that Google is who Powerset is gunning for). They’ll make the spreadsheets available for download or let people view them on the web via a Flash viewer.