Ask HN: Examples of businesses built on open data?

[vijayr]

I'm looking at examples of businesses built on open data - such as

1. Selling the data itself - like, take data from the govt, clean it, massage it etc and sell it

2. Services built on top of open data

3. Scraping - data that is not readily available in machine readable format, but can scraped (web pages, PDFs etc), packaged and sold.

Anyone knows examples of such?

[adrianh]

I started a company called EveryBlock (http://www.everyblock.com/) that compiled a ton of government data and sliced it by address/neighborhood.

Also check out the O'Reilly pamphlet about how to build companies based on open data. (I got it at a conference a while back and don't recall the exact title...)

[vijayr → adrianh]

Interesting. Do you plan to turn this into a business?

Also, any idea where I can get the pamphlet?

[adrianh → vijayr]

Sold the company more than five years ago and have since moved on. :)

[vijayr → adrianh]

Oh okay, cool :) Congrats!

[johnmurch]

You mean something like these?

http://geocod.io/ https://smartystreets.com/

[vijayr → johnmurch]

Yes, some other example

http://aggdata.com (scraping, not open data)

http://www.zip-codes.com/products.asp (open data)