Today there is an explosion of data around us, not only inside our enterprise, but even more so on blogs, communities, service providers, etc, on the web.

openkapow gives access to all those data in an unheard off easy way, basically any data as you see them in your web browser is now available for you right at your fingertip.

So which data are most valuable? 

I basically classify data into two groups:

• Standard data, data that anyone can get access to if they want to, data from the big web sites
  
• Specialized “niche” data, data from all the 50 million smaller sites on the web, i.e. the long tail of the web

Data from the long tail of web sites are typically unstructured and before openkapow, very difficult to access in an easy automated way.

Standard data is a basic necessity for mashups. For example looking at a classic mashup like housingmaps, which is a very cool mashup between maps from Google Maps and Craigslist, everyone can get to these data, and thus the mashup gives broad value to many people.

Niche data on the other hand could dramatically add more value to housingmaps for the right group of people. For example school boundaries and school ratings would add a lot of value to families with kids, fault line data would add a lot of value to people buying rather than renting, and so on.

With this in mind you will realize that openkapow is key to create mashups with individualized and higher value, something mashups is all about.

Try it out yourself.