Few will deny that these days we’re all feeling pretty much overwhelmed by Big Data, even if it’s really only a ‘little’ bit of data. Every day, we’re bombarded with Facebook updates, tweets, emails, YouTube videos, comments, news feeds and so on. The list is endless.

Most people cope with this Big Data jungle simply by subconsciously filtering out the junk for the little tidbits that actually interest us. But in some industries that approach just won’t work – take financial trading for example, where the only way to get ahead is to pay attention to every crumb of information you can get your hands on, then act on it as fast as your computer mouse lets you. For sure, financial traders rely on a lot of skill and luck besides this, but at the end of the day it’s the information at their disposal that gives them the edge.

But one of the problems these days is that data just isn’t enough – what with everyone being so connected, every trader has access to the same exact set of data, the same news stories and Twitter feeds, the same blogs and forums, effectively nullifying the advantage that it gives. So how to gain an edge in today’s connected world? Simple. You summarize that data, so it can be consumed faster and taken advantage of more quickly.

This is exactly what the Swedish startup Augify is hoping to pull off. They call their product a Cloud-based Data Science & Visualization-as-a-Service solution, and in a nutshell it allows people to quickly wade their way through a glut of news feeds, blogs, forums, Twitter streams and other sources, picking out key indicators such as sentiments, intentions, emotions and emerging trends. As for financial traders, this new data-science-as-a-service tool also gives them the ability to ‘mine’ buy and sell signals, as well as any rumors of big investments.

Augify aims to remedy the problem of their being too much data by presenting the clearest picture possible of what it all means – depicting it as a visualization of all that output in order to help people make their decisions more quickly.

We’ve seen previous efforts to do this in the financial trading world. Way back in 2010, when hardly any of us even knew what Big Data was, Wall Street traders were already working on data visualization programs to take advantage of sentiments on Twitter, correlating emotions with stock markets and proving a positive link between the two that worked to their advantage.

As Johan Bollen, co-creator of that early data visualization tool, explained at the time:

“We are in the early stages of a gold rush, If you would have told anyone 10 years ago that this data would be available, they would have called it science-fiction. We know that emotions play a significant role in markets.”

Now, Augify’s creator Jay Soloman aims to go one step further than those early efforts, mining data not just from Twitter but from every major data source around:

“It’s Twitter plus thousands of other data sources. We need new ways to aggregate, add meaning, and visualize this data in real-time. Data Science-as-a-Service is a crucial tool for human understanding as we transition from the Information to the Knowledge Revolution.”

Augify’s new data-science-as-a-service platform isn’t quite ready for launch just yet, but when it does get off the ground it’ll be interesting to see what advantages it brings. Curiously, it raises the intriguing possibility that if Augify really can deliver the results they promise, their solution will likely end up becoming an essential part of every trader’s toolkit anyway, effectively nullifying whatever advantage it brings – except of course, for those who get onboard soonest.