A few years ago I took a call from an analyst at a hedge fund who was looking for external data that would, in his words, provide “alpha.” I explained that our company was connected to thousands of data sources and hundreds of thousands of public datasets; I told him that we were continuously pulling in open data from 70 countries, standardizing it through an ingestion pipeline trained against the largest catalogue of public data in the world, and serving it up…

Why is data so important?

Despite being about as prevalent as electricity, it can be difficult to adequately explain how critical data is to the modern world. From business operations to tackling the environmental crisis, data is the key to unlocking insight and developing intelligent solutions across every sector. Although Big Data has been in the news for at least a couple of decades, other types of data are now getting air time as well. Open…

In May 2014, Milwaukee experienced 82 water main breaks in five days, sending thousands of people scrambling for water and costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in infrastructure repair and property damage. 

The series of breaks – although…

ThinkData Works' co-founder and CEO Bryan Smith has been named Vice-Chair of the Government of Ontario’s first-ever Digital and Data Task Force. The task force is part of a wider provincial strategy to help Ontarians benefit directly from the data economy, improving the data literacy of both citizens and businesses while ensuring their personal privacy is protected.

The task force is being developed by the province’s Ministry of Government and Consumer Services, and is…