Data mining represents new frontier

Most of us have heard of crowd sourcing but what about data mining?

The logic behind data mining is that by opening up a problem to millions of people on social networks, it will achieve a better result than could be achieved through traditional research.

Australian data-mining start-up Kaggle recently launched a $US3.3 million online data analysis competition, attracting contestants from all over the world.

Kaggle has already run 16 data prediction competitions, making money on licensing fees and consulting fees for the contests.

Kaggle’s community of data scientists comprises thousands of PhDs from quantitative fields such as computer science, statistics, econometrics, mathematics and physics.

“The idea is to make data science more of a meritocracy. We want to make it easier for people who are really good to demonstrate their abilities,” Kaggle co-founder Anthony Goldbloom says.

Does data mining represent a new frontier for start-ups? Certainly, there is money to be made in the concept, particularly as it appears to have a global appeal.