Construction Magazine October 2017 | Page 23

BUILDING PROFIT FROM DATA
Quandl staff sharing ideas in a meeting
in or around the construction industry , which may consider itself to have a potential data asset .
He adds : “ In the last 12 months it ’ s exploded , it ’ s become the hottest topic on Wall Street . It ’ s all about predicting the market . The only way you make money is if you can predict which stocks to buy or why commodity prices are going up and down . It ’ s unbelievably difficult to do so consistently . And the beauty for companies is that it ’ s revenue which drops right onto the bottom line .
You have the data just sitting there in the database and there is very little marginal cost to doing it . If you can take a dataset and turn it into a couple of million dollars by partnering with a firm like Quandl , then it ’ s great because it ’ s instant profit . There ’ s no cost , no additional infrastructure or personnel needed , so the attraction , and this goes beyond the construction industry , is because it ’ s an easily monetisable asset that can just be translated straight into profit .”
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