Taking in the keynote from the Strata has felt a lot like watching what amounted to a advertising blitz—each of the speakers took less than ten minutes a piece and focused on an individual industry sector rather than outlining things to come.  One sector that caught our eye was Zane Adam’s segment on the deluge of data, discussing ways in which marketplaces will be required to create usable interfaces around these virtual mounds.

It’s an interesting take on data management, and it’s a concept that will require flexibility to fit into a number of business developments, methods and enterprise structures.  One of the biggest data marketplaces to emerge today was Google’s Android Market Webstore, putting a user-friendly face on a growing pool of mobile software applications, all clamoring for attention, downloads and revenue.  This marks an important extension of the cloud, especially as it pertains to personal cloud data and access.  Not only will marketplaces need to be flexible for a number of industries, but fluid in their proper manifestation across devices and operating systems.

Cross-Sell and Dealer Specialties—the first a leader in automotive data, and the second a eminent provider for inventory and merchandizing logistics—have announced a joint project called MarketControl Analytics for the used-car industry. According to their press release, the product would “[combine] four comprehensive and integrated tools, including pricing, stocking, appraisal and sourcing, to deliver the industry’s most powerful, real-time, decision-making inventory management solution set.”

The big implications for this happen to be the cloud-control of real-time market values and solutions that would flow into used car retailers from the confluence of their inventories, allowing them to better grasp the economy and sales capability for vehicles in their region. This would benefit both customers and sellers, by giving salesmen the opportunity to know what their market could bear and give customers better deals. We’ve already seen this sort of movement with eBay’s purchase of Milo.com.

More literal translations of data marketplaces are cropping up across a myriad of industries as well, with MediaBank looking to such portals for sustainability in a shifting economy.  Adrift in the digital ad world, MediaBank is pointing many of its resources to become data marketplaces, recalibrating its priorities and taking advantage of new technologies in order to remain competitive.

Of course, a true benefit of a data marketplace is its ability to provide exchange rates for clusters.  This standardization of data is creating launch pads for several industries to head in new directions, incorporating a level of metrics and analysis that would have otherwise escaped the budget or the talents of existing employees.  Being able to pick up where someone else has left off is one of the biggest benefits of the cloud’s data-sharing capacity, extending knowledge as a valuable tool for self-improvement as a business.  Advertising industry players like MediaBank are certainly benefiting from such data marketplaces, but so are nonprofits like Blackbaud, with accessibility to data pools remaining an important necessity in this sector’s development.

By Kit Dotson & Kristen Nicole