Two of my favorite companies have now combined forces. Today in my email I received a message from the founder of Capital Factory company Keepstream. I will re-post it here for you. Congratulations to everyone involved! Keepstream is joining Infochimps! We are excited to announce that Keepstream has been acquired by Infochimps, leading API provider and data marketplace! Keepstream co-founders Jim England, Tim Gasper, and Huston Hoburg are joining Infochimps in order to help them develop exciting new [...]

I work with a lot of consumer startups that are dealing with location-aware information. From a programmer perspective, it’s just plain hard. Not only is it difficult to find a great source for quality geo data, but then you typically want to correlate it across multiple social systems (Foursquare, Yelp, etc). Some of my favorite code monkeys have just made this problem a little easier. Infochimps is pioneering a somewhat new category, named data-as-a-service. Today [...]

Most of you know our friends at the InfoChimps. Plying the honorable trade of helping you turn your data into money through their data marketplace. You also may be familiar with one of the hottest startups in the silicon valley; Twilio. They provide phone and SMS services in the cloud. The two of them are teaming up to have a little contest for those of you who are technically hip. Do something cool and creative [...]

With the news that Jive is buying Proximal Labs, people are starting to take notice of what some people term “Big Data.” The opportunities in Big Data are emerging, and some companies at the edge of the frontier have been around for several years. My definition of Big Data companies are those the collect and analyze large volumes of information.

Infochimps, a marketplace to buy, sell and share any list, spreadsheet or dataset in the world, today announced the acquisition of Data Marketplace, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that helps people find, buy and sell data online. With the acquisition, Infochimps is absorbing Data Marketplace’s domain, brand, datasets and technology platform into Infochimps’ holdings, and while the purchase price was not disclosed, it has been reported as an all-cash transaction. “We’re excited to be extending our [...]

On March 12th, Infochimps, a startup data marketplace here in Austin, entered into a revenue sharing agreement with MySpace allowing the social network’s data to be available for sale on the Infochimps site.

A week later, after ReadWriteWeb wrote about the deal, a number of negative comments and ensuing articles were written, most notably a conversation thread on Slashdot.

What happened here, and what can this tell us about the possible futures for data privacy?

If you’re attending the Innotech conference at the Austin Convention Center on Thursday, here’s a brief guide to some of the great things happening during the day. 9:30am Room 11 Developing in the Cloud with Josh Baer. Learn about cloud computing infrastructure, platforms and applications that you can leverage to reduce costs, increase reliability and improve productivity. Find out how to scale your application horizontally and be less dependent on monolithic SQL databases. 11:00am Room [...]

It’s time again for the Beta Summit at the Austin Innotech Conference. This is the second year that I’ve had the pleasure of hosting this event, and we’ve got some great companies that are going to show you some early stage, or recently launched technologies.

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Joseph Kelly, COO of Infochimps. Q:  Give us the elevator pitch for your company? Infochimps is a website to find, share, or sell any dataset in the world.  Our collection has over 5,000 datasets on topics from number of deaths in a Rambo movie to US census data.  Much of our data is free, however buyers come to us to look for data like the results from a Zogby poll [...]

Yet another Austin-based company launching at DEMO this week is Infochimps. They launched a new marketplace where users can upload and sell their datasets to potential buyers such as researchers or application developers. Infochimps customers control the terms, set the price, and Infochimps handles storage, distribution and billing. Infochimps takes a commission from each sale in the marketplace and also provides a separate, free service where anyone can upload, share and curate the data on the site.