I came across this article in the WSJ yesterday which included a blurb about a company called Liquid Robotics Inc. They make unmanned water vehicles. They recently raised $22 million. This news is fairly interesting to a geek like me, but the thing that really caught my attention was their recent pivot. At Infochimps our data suppliers typically fall into one of two categories: 1) companies in the business of selling data, and 2) companies in the business of selling something else, but that want to monetize their data byproduct. Liquid Robotics is an example of the latter. In the course of making unmanned water vehicles, they recognized their data byproduct was more valuable than what they were selling. As more and more companies recognize the value of their data, they will want to unlock that value, and hopefully come to Infochimps to do so. I’ve added Liquid Robotics to our data supplier queue…
