Infochimps, an Austin, Texas, statup launching today at DEMO, is marrying cutting-edge technology such as cloud computing and crowdsourcing with old-school efforts like aggregating data to create a marketplace for information sets. The startup takes data — from that of publicly available sources like the U.S. Census Bureau to privately available information sets like locations or even scientific results — and puts it up for sale on its web site. For its part in finding, posting and hosting the data it takes a 20 percent commission. In the interview below I talk to Infochimps’ Joe Kelly, COO, and Dhruv Bansal, chief science officer, about what one can do with access to all this information. (Their suggestions range from market research to finding inspiration for your next iPhone app.) The first 100 GigaOM readers who visit the site and type in “staceyknowsbest” can try it for themselves.
