Today, October 31, 2011, has been declared 7 Billion Day by the UNFPA, United Nations Population Fund.  Yes, despite lacking a complete census of the world’s population, today has been declared a milestone date in human history and to celebrate, the UNFPA launched 7 Billion Actions, where they are encouraging people to participate in their communities, both online and offline.

Our favorite part of this whole campaign?  The header link that says “Data” on the 7 Billion Actions page.  Here you’ll find a slick interactive visualization of the world’s current and projected demographics and population data.  Some of the most fascinating insights are documented in the videos at the bottom of the page, including this one, which illustrated the paradox of the current world’s population, which is both getting younger and older at the same time.

I came across this Wall Street Journal article last week which included a blurb about a company, Liquid Robotics Inc. They make unmanned water vehicles with some pretty impressive technology.

By continuously harvesting energy from the environment, Wave Gliders are able to travel long distances, hold station, and monitor vast areas without ever needing to refuel. A unique two-part architecture and wing system directly converts wave motion into thrust, and solar panels provide electricity for sensor payloads. This means that Wave Gliders can travel to a distant area, collect data, and return for maintenance without ever requiring a ship to leave port.

Others have also been impressed by the company and they recently raised $22 million. This news is fairly interesting to a VC geek like me, but the thing that really caught my attention was their recent pivot. At Infochimps our data suppliers typically fall into one of two categories: 1) companies in the business of selling data (eg AggData), and 2) companies in the business of selling something else, but that want to monetize their data byproduct (see: Twitter). Liquid Robotics is an example of the latter. In the course of making unmanned water vehicles, they recognized their data byproduct was more valuable than what they were selling.

Liquid Robotics is sending a fleet of four of their unmanned water vehicles across the Pacific (PacX) to collect over 2 million data points on salinity and water temperature, waves, weather, fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen. They are making this data accessible to scientists, but I am sure there are many companies chomping at the bit for it.

Many companies use their own data to gain insight into their operations, but more and more companies are using third party data to go way beyond that. Quentin Hardy posits in this New York Times article whether we’re in a big data bubble. He says yes, but I say no. The big data stack is maturing and the tools available enable companies to ask myriad questions to both their own data, as well as data from third parties. This marriage provides additional insight and begets many more questions.

Okay, I have a confession to make. Though I’ve helped write example queries, created wireframes for webpages and heck, even toyed around with our API Explorer, I’ve never written a single line of code. Not terribly surprising for a marketer; however, after hanging out with the chimps for the past six months, I felt like it was finally about time to learn something. But where to start? Would I really have the time to commit to a regular weekly class? Could I make myself curl up with an O’Reilly book on PHP or Ruby with other more pressing projects looming? Clearly, the only way I could make this a priority is for it to be fun!

Meet Codecademy, which I’ve been nerding out on all morning.  In fact, in the last hour, I’ve learned how to define variables and starting working with strings, substrings, arrays and if/else.  The best part of the whole thing?  It’s been absolutely delightful.  Much of this comes from the amazingly simple layout, which takes students through progressive lessons on the basics of programming and JavaScript in a command line setting.  The initial concepts are easy to grok and they build beautifully on each other, until suddenly, whoa – did I just define variables, prompt a user for input and create different returns based on user input?

While, this might not sound like much to the hardcore programmers out there, for a marketer who had never written a lick of code in her life as of an hour ago, Codecademy is a pretty rad resource.  Share it with your programming-novice friends and see what they think.  Or, contribute to their lesson plans and get more folks coding!

Just another typical Friday night, drinking beer, hanging out with friends and hacking!  That’s right, folks – an intrepid group of Infochimps along with dozens of other local developers, designers and nerd-tastic folks gathered at CoSpace for the second edition of our favorite local regular hack event – Friday Night Hacks!

This time around, we decided to offer a prize to our favorite hack and we’re pleased to announce the winner is Chris McGrath.  Using our new Geo API, Chris added a geo-location option to his QR Code Generator.  Using his app, you can turn almost any piece of information into a QR code that you can scan later to retrieve on your phone.  Rad!  For his efforts, he gets a sweet $100 ThinkGeek gift card and an even sweeter Infochimps belt buckle!

Thanks everyone for participating and we can’t wait til the next one!

I stumbled upon this TED Talk yesterday and found it too compelling not to share.  The speaker, Jamie Haywood describes his brother’s fight with ALS and the ingenious website they built together, where people share and track data on their illnesses.  Their discovery? The enormous power of collective data to explain and predict disease progression.

An individual patient can know their own symptoms, what drugs and treatments they are using, etc, but to deeply understand what fellow folks afflicted with your ailment are going through and how those findings can help you on your path, is far more powerful knowledge.

Thanks, xkcd.

“You can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time.” – Anonymous (although often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

As Minister of Office Joy, the OM (Office Manager) of Infochimps, I am well aware of the truth of this statement. However, my career goal is to prove it wrong (at least occasionally), and the chimps have given me a chance to attain this seemingly impossible dream.

My job is pretty simple: remove obstacles to my team, help provide them with the tools they need to shine, and increase team joy.  The thought is that happy teammates are productive teammates and productive teammates are happy teammates.  A few months ago, we started the Office Joy fund. Responsibility for this fund was put in my hands (insert evil laughter) and I thought, “There has to be a way to get everyone involved and please the majority of the team most of the time, (and maybe even all of them at once every now and then).”

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What are you doing on Friday, July 22nd at 1:20pm CT? You could be knocking back brewskis with our CEO, Nick Ducoff at historic Wrigley Field. He’s got prime tickets to the Cubs vs. Astros game and wants to take one lucky & talented developer out to the ball game. He’ll treat you to all the beer and peanuts you can handle – oh yeah!

All you’ve got to do is hack together an application or data visualization using at least one of our data sets or APIs and submit it to us by Wednesday, July 20th at 5pm CT. We’ll pick our favorite and let you know if you’re our winner by Thursday, July 21st!

Don’t live in Chicago, but still want to play along? We’ll send every person who enters a handful of starter decks of Startup: The Hackering, Infochimps’ infamous SXSW card game and some sweet stickers.

Here’s some of our favorite data sets and APIs we’d recommend starting off with:

• MLB win/loss data from Pennant
• Featured data sets and APIs from our blog
• Featured data sets from Data In Sight SF

For inspiration, check out what others have built using Infochimps data: App Gallery.

Entries must be submitted by Wednesday, July 20th at 5pm CT.  Click here for our entry form.

This past weekend, Jacob Perkins and I attended data in sight: making the transparent visual, a data visualization competition organized by Creative Commons, Swissnex San Francisco and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Held in the Adobe SF office and structured as a competitive hackathon, the aim for teams was to create a complete data visualization from scratch in two days.  Participants came from all over the world and included folks from established large companies, small start-ups, academia, non-profits, and several lone freelancers.

Friday evening, the contestants were briefed on the challenge.  Our very own Jacob delivered a stellar presentation of a carefully curated collection of useful datasets, that included specific suggestions of how the data might best be used.  This layer of practical explanation really helped folks quickly understand and get excited about the beautiful possibilities of Infochimps datasets.

After the presentations, participants formed into 19 teams of 3-5 developers, designers and data experts.  The groups worked continuously until Sunday at lunchtime and in the end, 14 of the teams delivered a final presentation, and 8 of the 14 used Infochimps data.  (You can peruse those 8 visualizations here: Pathlist, Marvel Universe Social Graph, UFO Siter, Uber Shady, Parkalator, CuriouSnakes, Disaster Strikes: A World In Sight and Silenced.)

A group of 11 judges (including myself) evaluated the teams’ efforts and while most of the teams created some impressive results, we quickly agreed upon the ones we thought were the best.  There were five prize categories, and 4 out of the 5 winners used Infochimps data!

MOST ACTIONABLE: Parkalator
This is a multi-model parking cost optimization tool for San Francisco residents.  It helps drivers decide where to park to save money or whether it’d be cheaper to take a cab.
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There is no such thing as a free lunch… except at Infochimps.

The idea behind free lunch being policy at Infochimps is that it helps people maximize productivity because each individual doesn’t have to think of where they want to eat, then what, and then go out, get it, and return; it also helps us bond as teammates to all eat at the same time and place. We’re constantly running the cost/benefit on this practice, but at least for now it seems to be much more beneficial than cost incurring.

Infochimps is about increasing both user and programmer joy in whatever ways we can. We’re always streamlining our processes, tweaking, and fixing things along the way. It’s amazing how sometimes a small but major pain point can be fixed with some deft coding.

As we’ve grown larger, making lunch easy to get for everyone and making sure that everyone could have their tastes accommodated was becoming a problem. I created a small database with all the restaurants we order from on a regular basis so that I could find their contact info and menus more quickly, and that helped for a little while, but even with that tool, we had a “lunch coup” one day. (It was peacefully resolved with some Asian take-out, and no one was harmed in the process.)

Enter: The Lunchlady

No, not that one! (more…)