Today we’ve learned that mBlast, a developer of cloud-based marketing applications, launched the free version of its mPact solution. mPact is a product which aggregates big data from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other websites to determine the top influencers and voices for the topic selected by the user. The offering brings together the cloud and big data analytics in one place, and delivers more accurate results that other offerings.

The move is a smart one for mBlast, luring new customers with free data.  As data tools become more prevalent in the marketing space, businesses must remain competitive and find new ways to appeal to clients and customers.  The free version of mPact may be limited, but smaller-scale users would still find to be very handy at times:

“This free version of mPACT allows the user to enter a keyword or topic and instantly discover the top 10 influential voices across blogs, articles and social networks, as well as their own influence ranking against all other voices in the market.”

mPact was introduced just earlier this year, and already managed to get quite a bit of attention from marketers. mBlast CEO Gary Lee told SiliconANGLE how his company’s product works around two major factors other off-the-shelf vendors and databases were unable to completely provide: speed and searchability. He continued to highlight the importance of the cloud and its scalability in the handling of such massive amounts of data .

Coinciding with trends such as the open-source cloud, open data initiatives’ such as the free version of mPact are also picking up. Another recent, and very original example is Infochimp’s Datasets API. The company has leveraged it to prove aliens and UFOs could have visited Earth by analyzing and visualizing every bit of relevant information available on the net.

Another open data visualization initiative comes from Google. The internet giant has opened up the Google Public Data Explorer just a few months ago, and released an API with which developers can come up with their own approaches to visualizations datasets.