Having had the privilege to be involved with Infochimps since its founding in the summer of 2009, and having led the company for the last year as CEO, it is with mixed feelings to announce that I will be reducing my day-to-day responsibilities with the company. In the interim, my co-founder Joe Kelly will be taking the reins. Having worked with Joe since the beginning, I know it will be a smooth hand off and the company will be in good hands as we expand. I will continue to be involved with Joe and the team as a Board Advisor.

In my time as CEO, we closed two rounds of financing, grew a tremendous user base, and built a best in class engineering team, including those that joined us through our acquisition of Keepstream. Our data catalog now boasts over 200 suppliers including Twitter and Foursquare, and with over 10,000 customers we’re well on our way toward our mission of democratizing access to data.

I’m excited to take what I’ve learned at Infochimps and all the friends I’ve made and apply it to something new and exciting. I look forward to what’s next, but am equally excited to continue to help the Infochimps team build the best data company in the world!

Two nights ago, my fellow chimps, Dhruv Bansal, Tim Gasper and I gave a presentation at the Austin Lean Startup Circle on the company’s recent transition to lean. We discussed our switch to a lean product strategy driven by must-have customer problems and the lean concepts and tools we have used to get there. It’s chock full of insights, struggles and great ideas for startups looking to adopt the Lean methodology.

For a version with full audio, check out it out on Posterous.

Do you love accessing cool data but hate scraping, cleaning and parsing it all day long? Apparently so do a lot of people! Come work for us and be a hero to developers everywhere who just want an easy place to access the data the want.  Check out our current open positions: Architect, Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Head of Marketing.

Here are just a few of the great things about working at Infochimps:

• A world class team of friendly people eager to tackle hard problems
• Ask around, we have one of the finest data science and scalable backend teams in the world
• Convenient location in downtown Austin, a city ranked Kiplinger’s #1 city for the next decade and Forbes #1 best bargain city
• Delish lunches brought in everyday, free for employees
• All the bananas you can eat
• Competitive salary and options
• Health insurance benefits, fully paid for employees
• If you want to be part of our team, please send a resume and details about why you would be excited to work at Infochimps to jobs@infochimps.com.

Look forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions!

Meet Jim the Monkey, the friendly greeter on our newly redesigned sign up page. Coincidentally, he shares a name with our new Director of User Experience, Jim England who has busily been improving key areas of Infochimps.com.  As you may recall, Jim (the human), formerly of Keepstream, joined just a few months ago and had already made some huge headway in making our site more user friendly, easier to navigate and just a wee bit cuter with the addition of Jim (the monkey).

Whether you’re a new visitor or a long-time fan of Infochimps, we’d love to know what you think of the changes we have underway!

Leave us a comment, send us a tweet, or send us an email with your thoughts!

New Header

Our new header compresses the best elements of our old one into a sleeker, easier to navigate design.  The upper part in lighter grey now holds our search bar as well as our key navigational elements.  The lower part in darker grey helps users navigate to our most popular API offerings, as well as access their account.  Bonus – when you’re logged in, the dark grey bar becomes our account navigator with quick links to your profile, API dashboard (complete with usage charts) and account settings.

(more…)

Thanks to an exciting new partnership with Bundle.com, we are proud to introduce a whole slew of exciting new APIs about spending trends.  Bundle uses aggregated, anonymized spending data from 20 million Visa and Mastercard customers to derive a slew of useful information on restaurants, bars and shops.  With the APIs they’ve made available on Infochimps.com, you can get detailed information, including location, loyalty score, average transaction amount, neighborhood, loyalty ranking, similar businesses and more about merchants in New York and San Francisco.  (There are plans to expand to more cities in the future.)

What can you do with this powerful information?  How about adding some real-life sales comparison data on your local competitors to your company’s analytics dashboard?  Building an app that appeals to bars with loyal customers and average tabs of over $50 and want to do some customer prospecting?  Creating a travel guide based on real-life customer behavior and not subjective opinions?  The possibilities with this data are boundless; we’re excited to see what you come up with!

Full list of Bundle.com APIs

Merchant Search API
Measure merchant loyalty and average transaction amount for thousands of San Francisco and New York Metropolitan Area bars, shops, and restaurants. Build cool apps that show how people really spend their money and what places have the most loyal clientele. The API pulls from Bundle.com’s extensive merchant data.

Detailed Merchant Search API
For a given merchant, get back its location, loyalty score, average transaction amount, neighborhood, and loyalty ranking by zip, neighborhood, and city. The API pulls from Bundle’s extensive spending and loyalty data for the San Francisco and New York Metropolitan Areas. Find merchant slugs by using the Merchant Search API by Bundle.com.

Neighborhoods API
Use this free API to find a list of neighborhoods and their geo-coordinates in the San Francisco and New York City Metropolitan Areas. What is exciting is that with the Merchant Search API by Bundle.com, you can find out about the buying habits of people in specific San Francisco and New York City Neighborhoods.

Metros API
Use this free API to get a list of available Bundle.com Metropolitan areas and their geo-coordinates. At the moment, you can find information on the San Francisco and New York City Metropolitan areas. In combination with the Merchant Search API by Bundle.com, this API allows you to gain insights on customer loyalty and spending habits.

Merchant Categories API
Use this free API to get a list of merchant subcategories for merchants in the New York City and San Francisco Metropolitan Areas. Subcategories fall under Food & Drink, Shopping, Travel & Leisure, Health & Family, House & Home, and Getting Around. Use this API in combination with the Merchant Search API by Bundle.com to gain insight on customer loyalty and spending.

Related Merchants API
The Related Merchants API recommends bars, restaurants, and stores based on a user’s favorite merchant in the San Francisco and New York Metropolitan Areas. The API pulls from Bundle.com’s extensive merchant similarity data. It is based on actual anonymous credit card transactions from Citi®.

We are excited to announce that Keepstream, social media curation and analytics company, will be joining the Infochimps family!  Jim England, Huston Hoburg, and myself, Tim Gasper are excited to now be Chimps. Together we’ll continue to develop exciting new data products and rock the world of Big Data.

With this announcement, we have two pieces of product news. Firstly, the Keepstream hand-curation product will slowly close down. The website will be set to “read-only mode” on September 30th. New user registration will be turned off and existing users will no longer be able to create or edit their collections. However, all collections will still be hosted online and be accessible at keepstream.com for viewing. So don’t worry, those links you’ve shared will still work just fine. We will be exploring options for exporting collections or integrating with similar curation services. If you’d be interested in something like this, leave me a note at tim[at]keepstream[dot]com.

Secondly, Keepstream Reports, located at http://reports.keepstream.com, will continue forward. It has the potential to be both a more automated way to archive social media as well as a way to create beautiful, actionable social media analytics reports. It’s currently in private beta.

We are really excited about we can accomplish together, you can look forward to many exciting developments soon to come!  Also, Jim and I will be attending TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco next week.  If you’ll be there too, we’d love to meet you.  Just look for us in our brand new Infochimps shirts or shoot us a tweet at @JimEngland or @TimGasper.

We’ve been working on a brand new API that will rock your world.  It’s our Geo API, which allows developers to access disparate geo-related data sources through one API with a unified schema.  It’s pretty sweet, if we do say so ourselves.

Our geo data comes from open sources like Geonames, the National Climatic Data Center, and the American Community Survey from the US Census Bureau as well as licensed sources like Locationary and Foursquare. Also, because we recognized that geo data need not be constrained by the traditional notions of geo data, we’ve also included geo-located Wikipedia articles amongst the sources. In fact, any data set that can be tied to a location can ultimately be added to the Infochimps Geo API. We will continue to add additional data sources in the near future and are totally happy to hear your suggestions if you’ve got ‘em!

With this API, we’ve tried to address some of the biggest developer pain points in working with geo data:

1. Difficulty in integrating several different APIs into one unified app
2. Lack of ability to display all results when zoomed out to a large radius
3. Limitation of only being able to use lat/long

We’ve addressed each of the above issues with our new Geo API using the Infochimps Simple Schema, Summarizer and multiple Geolocator options.

(more…)

Happy Friday, everyone! Turns out that while Chimps in Chicago developer contest did garner some interesting entries, none of our entrants were from Chicago.  And in an unfortunate coincidence, our CEO, Nick Ducoff who was going to treat the winner to the Cubs vs. Astros game and all the beer and peanuts they could handle, had his flight get cancelled last minute this morning.

Since Nick won’t be able to make the game, we’re posting a real live link to the actual tickets here.  If you’re in Chicago and reading this message and want to go to the game, print these babies out and be the first at the ballpark today! :)

Everyone who entered will still be receiving a care package of chimpy swag to enjoy wherever they may be geographically.  We have plans abrewin’ for a hackday here in Austin in early September tied to ATX Startup Week, so stay tuned about that.

In the meanwhile, if you have ideas for how we can make our next online hackathon even better – we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Last week’s developer contest with our friends at Twilio yielded a diverse set of entries ranging from an app that reports your Twitter influence to a tool to help you look up valid words for Scrabble.  With a theme as general as simply “data”, and the goal was to see what interesting applications our developer communities could make using both Twilio’s API and Infochimps data sets and data APIs.  Ultimately, we agreed that Roger Pincombe’s entry, Social Contact, made the best use of all the data available through us.  Roger is a previous Twilio contest winner, so he’s no stranger to building fly apps on the fly.

To use Social Contact, all you have to do is send a person’s Twitter username as a text to (203) 403-NAME (6263). You’ll get back an e-mail containing a vCard with as much information as publicly available, including full name, company and title, email (occasionally), phone number (occasionally), home page url, home location (generally city-level), description, summary, Klout, photo, Facebook profile link, and other social profile pages.

Here’s what Roger had to say about his app:

“This contest allowed me to solve a problem I’ve been running into a lot recently as a fledgling entrepreneur, remembering all the amazing people I meet on a daily basis. I have a horrible memory, and I’m especially bad with names, so sometimes meeting people again can be kind of awkward. What does he do again? What was her name? With 203-403-NAME, all I have to do is text someone’s twitter username, and I instantly get back a name, photo, job, and sometimes other contact info, ready to be added to my phone’s address book for future reference. Oh, and I have a great domain name, http://contacts.io, that I’ve been wanting to find a use for, so this fits nicely. I’ve got a web interface in the works, which should be ready to go in less than a week.

Social Contest uses the Infochimps Social Identity Mapping API, as well as other sources to boost the robustness of the information returned to the user.  Roger notes that the Google Social Graph API was also extremely useful.  His code is in C#, running on ASP.NET 4.0.

If you’d like to play around with Social Contact, just send a text to (203) 403-6263 with a Twitter username.

Honorable Mention

There could only be one winner, but we also wanted to recognize Textable, made by Steve Odom (full disclosure: Steve is an Infochimps contractor, but that doesn’t make his app any less awesome and he didn’t get any special help from us!). Using a variety of the Infochimps data sets, Steve created an SMS application that helps people find important nearby locations in unfamiliar cities.

Say you land in Austin and need to find WiFi quickly. Simply text “wifi AUS” to (512) 782-2513 and you’ll get back a list of nearby places that offer wifi. Text “walgreens 78702″ and you’ll get back nearby Walgreens locations. In general you can text wifi, library, walgreens, and help (Steve is working on adding walmart, atm, and UFOs) followed by a zip code or three-letter airport code. Give it a whirl!

Your Turn

Want to get involved?  We’re cooking up ideas for future developer contests.  In the meanwhile, Twilio holds developer contests regularly and you can get all the details here.  You can also build on any of our data sets and APIs anytime anywhere.  Sign up for an API key today.

Did you stumble on our site and say to yourself “Okay, so you have all this data, but what can I do with it?”  Whether you’re a data nerd developer looking to see what others have built on our datasets and APIs or just a curious chimp looking for how to make sense of it – we’ve got the right place for you.

Introducing… The App Gallery.

(more…)