Data is a hot business. The recent acquisitions of NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas highlight that fact. “Data? is typically produced by specialized groups of people, producing data that is used for specific and explicit purposes. Web 2.0 has also brought about 2 major trends here - the first is the concept of peer production, where groups of seemingly unrelated people conscientiously come together to collaborate on producing specific data, with Wikipedia being the prime example.

An example is Payscale, a website where people can contribute their own pay scale data in order to receive the aggregated data of people in their domain. The second trend is about the emergence of implicit data which are much more than mere behavior trails, but are actually much more accurate proxies of the user’s attention, ranging from intention data (search), attention data (tagging and voting), location data (GPS), to interaction data (between users on a social network). [11:04] bradyforrest: As the complexity of production, aggregation, distribution, and terms of data consumption gets more complicated, what are the challenges facing companies seeking to manage this complexity? How will people expect to be paid for their data? Money? Attention? Quid pro quo? How can organizations process data, insights and actions iteratively through the constant use of experiments?