Tim O’Reilly was commenting on some Google business when he points out that data ownership is crucial to future technology giants.
we see here another demonstration of my Web 2.0 principle that “data is the Intel Inside”, and that many of the future battles between industry giants will be around who owns data, rather than who controls software APIs. In that battle, we’ll see deployed all kinds of techniques to “harness collective intelligence” to build added value databases of various kinds.”
Google now has a free 411 phone service which he suspects is a vehicle for harvesting voice data to train speech recognition and translation software. It makes perfect sense.
This is why I think data mining is an integral part of drug discovery. Can you sell a specific decision support system for therapeutic targets? How much is a proprietary data warehouse of experimental data worth?
The explosive data acquisition rate of modern life sciences is overwhelming our ability to interpret it. Perhaps Google had a good strategy for data integration prior to opening the floodgates of this 411 service. What’s clear is that Google knows information is worth money and they are more than willing to roll out great free services in order to get it from you.