Paul Kedrosky has a fascinating post up about Flickr’s use of metadata to demonstrate the popularity of cameras used by their users. Freshbooks, a company that my mesh partner Mike McDerment co-founded, did the same thing a while back.
With business moving to the web and data increasingly available for this kind of analysis, can the task of market research be atomized and then the data syndicated to whomever needs to use it? And why not an online marketplace of the analyses? Fascinating stuff.
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I’d be pretty excited if I was doing my PHD in statistics right now I’ll tell you…there is going to be a real need for people who can derive real meaning from all the data these apps are collecting…
Isn’t Freshbooks an invoicing system? I don’t see the relation here… That being said, I totally agree with your analysis that the next big thing market research is the integration of web meta-data.
Olivier – I should have noted the Freshbooks link – here it is.
Makes more sense now – thanks. Freshbooks’s initiative is very smart and… inspiring :-)