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Little startup Infochimps has a platform for big data

Infochimps announces platform as a service environment for the redhot big data market.

Blake Robinson
Blake Robinson got his start in tech as a semi-professional gamer. He was the first Managing Editor of CrunchGear, the former gadgets and electronics arm of TechCrunch. His writings on new and emerging technologies have been featured in ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, paidContent, Uncrate, Conde Nast and Ziff Davis. Blake splits his time between San Francisco and New York.
Blake Robinson

Infochimps today announced a scalable platform for big data environments. The Infochimps latform is the first formal product for the company, which, to date, has served primarily as a big data marketplace.

The Austin-based Infochimps initially developed its data system behind the Infochimps Platform as the foundation for its big data marketplace. With the Infochimps Platform, customers will be able to leverage a proven big data system to construct big data projects for less money and optimize them more deftly.

A platform as a service (PaaS) model will heavily reduce costs by facilitating the creation of big data constructs while circumventing the need for in-house hardware and maintenance. Enterprises with the resources (or those with the need) to build and manage their own big data infrastructures can also utilize the Infochimps Platform in on-premise deployments.

Perhaps the biggest point of interest in the Infochimps Platform, however, will stem from its interoperability with the Infochimps Marketplace. It will be able to quickly combine internal data from their platform deployments with external data from the marketplace.

Admittedly, it's unlikely that anyone outside of data science will be pumped about this announcement, many will benefit from the implementation of products like Infochimps Platform. As data scientists are able to crunch larger and more varied data sets, the insights derived from these processes could yield cures for cancer--or they could just help Nike sell more shoes.