What Is Information Worth

We’ve mentioned in the Partner page our plan to aggregate patient care data across care units and even countries, training our BANN to get better at prediction.

In the process we’ll build a unique resource – information which can be used to inform research, provide evidence of efficacy, and identify best practice.It will also offer the potential to accelerate the typical clinical discovery process – research, trial, peer review and publish.

What will this information be worth? We don’t know, because nobody has ever done it before.

But here’s an interesting example from the finance sector.

In this article TechCrunch reports on $14 million of VC funding made available to Mint.com.

The article explains:

“Since launching at TechCrunch40 in 2007, Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it’s also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn’t even begun to tap into yet.

Because Mint pulls data directly from financial institutions, it knows where people are shopping and how much they’re spending. It can use this anonymized data in aggregate to track performance of entire industries or even individual stores. Up until now Mint hasn’t done anything with its merchant level data, but it’s beginning to open that up to press (see the chart below for a look at how the downturn is affecting grocery stores, which shows high end stores like Whole Foods and Bristol Farms taking a big hit in the down economy). This kind of data can be very valuable — don’t be surprised if we start seeing Mint leverage in other, more lucrative ways”.