A group of startups are helping smaller businesses find cost-effective ways to use their data to serve customers and improve their bottom line. Recently, Jetpac, a free iPad app that turns your friends' photos into a customized travel magazine, wanted a way to find its users' best images, said founder and chief technology officer Pete Warden. But instead of saddling its team with the project, Jetpac wanted to hire data experts to help. So they sponsored a contest on Kaggle, a platform for data science competitions. Within three weeks, the competition's top three teams had more than 85 percent accuracy in finding the best photos, and Jetpac had a solution to its photo quality problem.
While Kaggle mostly works with larger companies that have accumulated more data, it's the smaller businesses that often don't need - or can't afford - a full-time data scientist, said Kaggle founder and CEO Anthony Goldbloom. While some small businesses might balk at the expense of data - and hiring an in-house data scientist is certainly costly - business owners said the price of online data tools was worthwhile.
Read more at Reuters
