Free Data as in Free Beer

I found myself wandering the aisles at the American Library Association national conference over the weekend. Plenty of publishers, library management systems and book shelf builders, none of which are particularly relevant to this blog (although there was at least one “loyalty” system for library patrons). There was some search technology but nothing particularly noteworthy.

The only exhibitor that did catch my eye was Data-Planet, which aggregates data on many topics (think census, economic time series, stocks, weather, etc.) and makes it accessible over the Web through a convenient point-and-click interface. The demo system was incredibly fast for Web access, although I don’t know whether the show set-up was typical. The underlying database is nothing special (SQL Server), but apparently the tables have been formatted for quick and easy access.

None of this would have really impressed me until I heard the price: $495 per user per year. (Also available: a 30 day free trial and $49.95 month-to-month subscription). Let me make clear that we’re talking about LOTS of data: “hundreds of public and price industry sources” as the company brochure puts it. Knowing how much people often pay for much smaller data sets, this strikes me as one of those bargains that are too good to pass up even if you don’t know what you’ll do with it.

As I was pondering this, I recalled a post by Adelino de Almeida about some free data aggregation sites, Swivel and Data360 . This made me a bit sad: I was pretty enthused about Data-Planet but don’t see how they can survive when others are giving away similar data for free. I’ve only played briefly with Swivel and Data360 but suspect they aren’t quite as powerful as Data-Planet, so perhaps there is room for both free and paid services.

Incidentally, Adelino has been posting recently about lifetime value. He takes a different approach to the topic than I do.