Rise of Data Marketplaces

Data ownership refers to both the possession of and responsibility for information. Ownership implies power as well as control. The control of information includes not just the ability to access, create, modify, package, derive benefit from, sell or remove data, but also the right to assign these access privileges to others. Ownership of data is conventionally assumed to belong to the entity that generated or purchased it. Universities and other research labs are assumed to own the data of their employees. Legally, data ownership is determined by the laws of the nation in which the data is being used. Laws concerning data ownership vary greatly not only from continent to continent, but also from nation to nation.

It’s important to understand that all sorts of data can be collected about you when you use a web browser or a mobile phone, and a lot of that can take place without your knowledge. Heck, it happens even when you’re not signed up or logged into some services. With the tools available to them today, a company can craft a detailed profile on people who use the internet — and by signing up for various online services, we’re just making things easier for them. The majority of us are fundamentally blind to the terms of use stipulated by the Facebooks and Googles of our world. We can’t be realistically expected to give informed consent — but here we all are, clicking ‘I agree’ on scores of apps’ registration pages without a second thought.

As technology advances, the value of data will continue to increase, and unless we change the way we regulate businesses, it’ll also become harder to protect our privacy. The conversations we’re now having about how companies like Facebook should operate will likely form the foundations of how they will be run in the future, and that’s why it’s important to care about who has your data, how much of it, and what they’re doing with it.

What is a Data Marketplace?

Data Marketplace helps people find, buy and sell data online. It helps users seeking a specific data to creating a request for free, explain their needs, add an optional deadline and budget, and in turn allows aggregators respond with relevant data for purchase. All of the data on Data Marketplace is available for immediate purchase and download. They provide data in standard formats (e.g. Excel, CSV, XML, JSON) .

Selling data in a particular format helps make them more usable to the buyer. Although many types of data can be bought and sold via data marketplaces, some common types of data marketplaces involve selling information about consumers, demographic data, personal data, or a mix of both.

Critics of this kind of data commerce have raised the question of how much of the commercial data is fairly and transparently collected, and whether there can be full oversight for these markets.

Data, like oil more than a century ago, is not viewed as particularly valuable to most people. In hindsight, oil has been. Data is already extremely valuable to companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Only, they don’t pay you for it. Instead you get ‘free’ services. If something is free to you, you are likely the product. Your data gets sold to other parties that do different things with them, varying from impressive to dystopian.

Data Marketplace Characteristics and Components

Commercial marketplaces exist in many diiterent torms — at the highest level, brick and mortar versus digital — and there are substantial differences among digital markets. Each has different characteristics related to product selection, inventory management, and shopper experience. Consider, for example, the differences between shopping at Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and Uber. From search and browse to the delivery of products and services, each interacts with shoppers differently. Data is especially well suited to a digital marketplace because data itself is digital. The advantages of brick-and-mortar shopping — physical touch and instant access — simply don’t matter with digital products.

Four major characteristics of marketplaces are especially important in the data world:

• Categorisation organises the marketplace to simplify browsing. For example, a shopper seeking budget data doesn’t need to browse through unrelated data sets about customers, employees, or other data subjects. Categories complement tagging and smart search algorithms, offering a variety of ways to find data sets.
• Curation is active management of the data sets that are available in the EDM. Curation selects and qualifies data sets, describes each data set, and collects and manages metadata about the collection and each individual data set.
• Cataloging exposes data sets for data shoppers, including descriptions and metadata. The catalog is a view into the inventory of curated data sets. Rich metadata and powerful search are important catalog features.
• Crowdsourcing is the equivalent of a social network for data. Data shoppers actively participate in cataloging, curating, and categorising data. This virtuous cycle (a chain of events that reinforces outcomes through a feedback loop) continuously improves the quality and value of data in the marketplace.

Why do we need a Data Marketplace?

The Marketplace is a model that is particularly well suited to ecommerce. Not only does it come across as a good solution to issues about finding trusted products for consumers, it also adapts itself to the specific nature of Internet selling for traders, brands and other distributors alike. This model is in the interests of all of the value chain players cited above (operator, buyers, sellers). It is a win-win-win model. Thanks to mechanisms set up on a Marketplace, exchanges between the different ecosystem players are more streamlined and many of the issues they normally face can be resolved.

Marketplaces are the solution to current and future e-commerce demands: they promote the capitalisation of strong brands, qualified traffic or professional know-how to bring together offers proposed by third party sellers on a single platform. By putting sellers and customers in direct contact, Marketplaces mirror the very DNA of the Internet: creating value whilst reducing the chain. By emancipating themselves to a large extent from current e-commerce constraints, Marketplaces guarantee substantial gains for all players involved (operator, seller, buyer). Amazon, Wall Mart, Best Buy, Fnac …. each one of these e-commerce giants has in recent years, launched their own Marketplace. For some, this activity already accounts for more than 40% of products sold and constitutes almost 100% of profitability! For other vertical Marketplaces created from scratch, such as Etsy (Arts & Crafts), Farfetch (Fashion) or Foodzie (Artisan food) this activity represents 100% of sales, sometimes exceeding the billion Euro mark. All of these examples confirm that the revolution is well and truly underway and that hundreds of new Marketplaces will appear all over the world.

The benefits gained from Marketplaces are many and consistent with a logic that aims for each of the parties to win:

• More products, less stock, pooled costs for the operator,
• More customers, less investment and controlled choice for the seller,
• More choice, better prices and a secure buying experience for the customer.

IOTA DATA MARKETPLACE

The launch of the IOTA Data Marketplace on November 28, 2017 has received a lot of attention in the media.

With your payments done on Tangle, you would easily be able to export it to the right format, giving insight in the true cost of living in your neighbourhood. You could compare if your conditions are still met, benchmarking them against other places. Other people could pay you (micro-amounts of) money to know if they are making the right choice.

On top of that, you could take into account air quality over a years time when you’re an asthma patient, noise levels if you are sensitive to sound or even solar activity if you either in danger of skin cancer or are affected by SAD (seasonal affective disorder). To some these might be trivial points, to others they are vital.

With a data market like IOTA’s, you can buy the right data for you. Other data currently online is either averaged/filtered, or unobtainable for normal people. On top of that, transacting with IOTA is fee-less. If I pay you one cent, you get one cent. No 3% transaction fee, with a starting fee of 50ct.

There are still a lot of wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but data is extremely valuable, and a data market place making them easily available for even pennies should therefore also be extremely valuable.

The Data Marketplace is open for everyone to participate right now, and over the coming weeks we will be opening up an API for the marketplace so that anyone can contribute sensors and build new data-driven applications. Right now, the entire Proof of Concept runs in real-time on the IOTA test network, with full end-to-end data verifiability and security offered via Masked Authenticated Messaging in the user’s browser.

Over the coming weeks, the IOTA Foundation, in collaboration with several of the marketplace participants, will release additional content. This will include Proof of Concept applications further elucidating how the data marketplace can be applied to different industries and sectors. Most important is the community’s participation, where the IOTA Foundation will host several events over the coming weeks to make the data marketplace a truly global, collaborative effort. The final result of the data marketplace will be a public report including several case studies that go into detail on the potential and the barriers we will face when rolling out a marketplace in full-scale production. Major emphasis will be dedicated to the impact of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the planned future live data marketplace.

The IOTA Foundation is exhilarated to be able to announce that we have several dozen world-leading entities participating in this data marketplace which will run over the next 2 months. We deem it pivotal to have such a plethora of varied data sources from multiple stakeholders participating in this pilot to nurture the blossoming of this seed of potential and move beyond grandiose promises and theory into the real world.

Some Other popular data marketplaces

1. Ocean Protocol- A Decentralized Data Exchange Protocol to Unlock Data for AI.
2. Datum- Decentralized marketplace for social and IoT data.
3. Qlik DataMarket- Qlik DataMarket provides a complete cloud-based data service to a large variety of external syndicated data sources via a subscription model.
4. Factual- It specializes in location data.
5. Wibson- A decentralized data marketplace empowering individuals to monetize their own data.
6. Salesforce Data MarketPlace.

A marketplace enables effective interaction between sellers and product/service buyers, on the same space, with a view to providing the most competitive and comprehensive choice possible, in a structured and secure environment. In this context, there is a true disintermediation going on at the very heart of the Internet’s DNA, generating value for all parties concerned: operator, seller and buyer. By grouping the product ranges of a multitude of sellers, a Marketplace maximises stock, reduces delivery times but without eroding the quality of service. Full-line or vertical, Marketplaces are proving more and more to be an inescapable development whether in terms of physical goods, intangibles or services.

This is not the ultimate solution, but at least a step towards control over your data and the proper intended usage of it. Let’s get our data back to our control.

Do leave your thoughts down if you feel this is ground breaking and why you think so.