TECHNOLOGY
database . They just have to make the small investment involved in turning it into a product ; there ’ s a nice healthy revenue stream to be had .
“ Of course , it would depend on the company and its particular line of business . If they ’ re a lumber company , say , then they ’ re going to have a very good sense of demand for lumber . They ’ re going to have that information implicitly because of what they do , but that could turn out to be something that a professional investor could turn into a trading strategy .
“ This is a big thing – data commercialisation – and outside the construction industry , lots of companies are doing this and making lots of money . I think it ’ s an opportunity that construction companies should be looking at . It ’ s an under-tapped market .”
Kamel is a former quantitative analyst who has spent his entire career in the finance industry , and he says Quandl was borne out of his own frustrations with the tools that fed data to practitioners like himself .
‘ Tammer Kamel , CEO and founder of Quandl , a company which specialises in the monetisation of data , is adamant that there is money to be made by construction companies ’
Identifying valuable assets The computer engineering graduate has examined closely the potential for companies in and around the construction industry to make money from their data assets , and says that there are two main ways that construction insights can be interesting to Wall Street .
Kamel says : “ One is in a macroeconomic sense and one is in a company-specific sense .
“ In the macro-economic sense , construction activity is a critical part of the economy of any region , whether a specific country or globally , and it ’ s a substantial component of global GDP .
18 October 2017