Grueling hours spent collecting and editing data, just to make it useful, is all part of the fun of big data. Infochimps wants to be that platform to find, sell and share all public data. They do this through data sets and data APIs.

Earlier today at the Structure Big Data conference, Infochimp’s CTO Flip Kromer talked about the vision for the company: becoming a marketplace for all data, regardless of vertical.

Curious to get more of the company’s vision, our Editor-in-Chief Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins followed up with, Joe Kelly, COO of Infochimps shares the company’s vision. He said, “Infochimps wants to be the platform and the marketplace for all public data. They were talking at the conference today, and the stats that were mentioned were along the lines of 90% of data have been created during last two years. We want to be the marketplace for that, regardless of the sector that data will appeal to. Beyond that, our goal is to allow developers to easily build on that data.”

The organization sees this vision with reality and loops in three ways to get into the marketplace:  getting data up in the cloud, can ramp up in less than two weeks, excluding

Assuming the dataset is less than a gig in size, self service is available through the community website. For larger datasets and providers looking to make a splash with their dataset, implementation of everything up to the API can be done in less than two weeks.

Infochimps also is targeting to be the provider of online service for very large unutilized mounting data sets for marketing purposes.

Aside from this, Infochimps are reviewing another strategy that could place them ahead of the game—“theming” groups of data releases like health, geography, etc. The company also intended to adapt and fuse business models of two auction titans, eBay and Amazon. However, they will just be selecting the “good” ones. For one, they would definitely wish to have the same open feedback system as eBay, but drop the auction mechanism. However, the ultimate paradigm for community building is Github, which do what Infochimps do, but for code.

Recent developments around Infochimps backyard is their team up with AND to offer places, geo and mapping services. Just over a week ago, Infochimps also announced addition of APIs that will enable one to access information from Twitter, government agencies and Wikipedia articles. Their potential was realized DFJ Mercury through first round of funding worth $1.2 million.

[Editor’s Note: Photo credit to @tdavidson, used with permission. –mrh]