Do You Find Data on the Web Too Cumbersome? Dataweave.in SimplifiesThe Problem

Data and gaining insights in data are crucial for any business: Be it in creating applications or gaining insights from data, any developer or business has to get the “right data in the right form”. Though lots of valuable public data exists on the Web, this data is hard to use. Businesses often manually collate this data which is time consuming and costly.To ease this, Banglore based DataWeave provides easy-to-access data APIs over data that exists on the Web. It helps users discover, monitor and visualize public data on the Web in a uniform format: data APIs, dashboards and visualizations. Data examples that businesses find useful are pricing data and open data. The ideal of DataWeave is, “Data must be easily accessible and readily available to all users”.

Operational from April 2011, DataWeave creates datasets by aggregating data (both structured and unstructured) from disparate sources that are continuously changing, extracting relevant data from these sources and making them available through easy to use data APIs. Users get data in json format, now, but can be provided with data in any of the standard formats (xls, csv, xml …)

Currently, they are concentrating on two data verticals: Pricing data and open government data. PriceWeave.com, a price aggregation and monitoring engine, is the first product that has been built using DataWeave’s API.

As a whole, data sales is a $100B industry in the US. $2.3M worth applications are built using open data. With the Web as a distribution channel and including open data into their offerings, Dataweave feels this field can be disrupted. While US Companies likedatamarket.com, factual.com, semantics3.com necessarily operate in the same space, Dataweave concentrates on providing data related to the APAC region.

Indiatimes Shopping, Easyration, Hoopos and Zigwheels are currently using their data APIs. Their customers fall broadly into the category of Application developers, Market research firms, Media orgranizations, Data Analysts and eCommerce companies. The revenue generated is of a monthly subscription based model, where users pay for the number of API calls they make. Currently, they are working on their pricing model and create a pay-as-you-use model.

Starting Up:

A team of 4 currently, Dataweave was conceptualized by :

Karthik B. R.- who completed his masters in information retrieval from IIIT –Bangalore in 2007. He worked at the internet arm of Network18 for a period of 3 years.Vikranth Ramanolla- who worked at the internet arm of Network18 for a period of 3 years. He was responsible for building huge distributed data processing systems.

Dakshina Murthy BM, who completed his masters in operating systems from IIIT –Bangalore in 2009. He worked at the internet arm of Network18 for a period of 2 years. Then worked at Glam Media for 1 year.

At Network18, they realized that though a lot of public data exists, people don’t know how to access and extract this data into a usable format. That was when they hit on this idea of providing aggregated / curated datasets using a data-as-a-service model. They raised a sum of 10 Lakhs INR from TLabs and are looking to raise more funds.

“It is relatively a new market that people are beginning to notice now. Designing APIs that lets businesses / developers easily access this data. Tapping into the developer community is also a challenge. The technology stack has to be robust to handle big data problems. We need to efficiently extract data from various different formats and represent them efficiently” Karthik, on behalf of Dataweave, tells Yourstory.