Founder
Eugene Tsyrklevich
Product
Parkopedia is an international, crowdsourced parking space finding app - a wikipedia for parking.
Website
Open data
Open data on car parks and street parking was sourced by a dedicated team. Where data wasn't available the team physically surveyed information on spaces.
Business progress
In April 2010, Parkopedia landed it's first major customer with The AA - a UK car insurance and breakdown cover company. Parkopedia white labelled their original app for use by AA customers. Parkopedia recently announced deals with Lexus, Audi and BMW to power their global in-car parking services.
Funding
The team couldn't secure any traditional funding routes. So they ended up funding themselves and launched the product once it was ready to attract high level investors and partnerships.
Founders
Chris Taggart and Rob McKinnon
Product
OpenCorporates is the largest openly licensed database of companies in the world, with over 60 million companies.
Website
Open Data
The website makes any government data relating to companies easily available to anyone. By providing a single database of companies that can be searched without fee, and without restriction, it is radically changing the ability of journalists, NGOs, small companies, and even governments to understand and combine their company-related data.
Business Progress
Despite being less than 2 years old, OpenCorporates is already working with national governments and intergovernmental bodies to increase the transparency and understanding of company data, including the World Bank and the Financial Stability Board. The OpenCorporates project operates what it calls a ‘sharealike licence’, whereby all its data is free for anyone to use; in return, any product of that data must also be open for others to use. For organisations who don’t want to give back data, they pay OpenCorporates a fee.
Funding
OpenCorporates was incubated by the Open Data Institute.
Although Chris and Rob hadn’t projected any income for the first two years, they already have paying customers who are eager for access to their data.
Founders
Fran Bennett, Bruce Durling
Product
Mastodon C are big data specialists that gather, scrub, model and analyse a client’s data to drive profits and provide business insight. With a focus on environmental sustainability, Mastodon C built datasets to pinpoint low carbon emission servers and use the infrastructure to provide green data solutions for clients.
Website
Open Data
Business Progress
Mastodon C carried out a big data analysis task for the UKs National Health Service (NHS). They gathered and geo mapped prescription data to reveal that certain doctors in the UK were over prescribing more expensive drugs to patients instead of cheaper brands. Read the full report here:
http://www.prescribinganalytics.com; published across the UK this brought Mastodon C to the limelight, raising the profile of data analytics.
Funding
The team were accepted onto the Bethnal Green Ventures start-up accelerator programme. After this they were announced as one of the Open Data Institute’s incubator start-ups.
Founders
Jonathan Gray, Rufus Pollock and Friedrich Lindenberg
Product
OpenSpending exists to “map the money worldwide” – that is, to track and analyse public financial information globally. It is a central, high-quality, open database of public financial information, including budgets, spending, balance sheets, procurement etc.
Website
https://openspending.org
Open data
All material created within the project is open data and open content built with open tools. All project data is made available under the Open Database License or another Open Data Commons license. Furthermore the site is community-run so anyone interested in financial data can contribute.
Business progress
Started as a UK pilot project entitled ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ The successes of this project then directly lead to the provision of funding and the international spread of the model in the form of the OpenSpending platform.
Funding
Community-driven project with generous support offered from 4IP, Open Society Foundations, Knight Foundation and Omidyar Network.
