Peering into the live stream for the Facebook Developer conference is like looking into a scientist’s laboratory about the future of business.

But take a step back and its apparent that innovative uses for data goes well beyond the F8 developer conference in San Francisco.

The use of analytics to identify the connections between pieces of information has moved out of the lab and into the world where products are made, delivered and sold.

At the IBM Smarter Commerce Summit this week I ran across a young company called SignalDemand that demonstrates how data lights up more than a Facebook social graph.

The company provides predictive analytics solutions. It works with customers that serve our every day needs. These are customers that bake bread, sell groceries and make everything from soap to lotions.

It’s not easy to run a baking operation these days. People eat less bread. Their portions are smaller. ConAgra Mills knows this. In a discussion at the IBM event, SignalDemand CEO Mark Tice recounted how the commodity food producer worked with his company and IBM Smarter Commerce to shift its supply chain to meet the changing tastes of the consumer.

Compare Facebook and its app partners to IBM and SignalDemand and similarities surface in the ways both use data. The SignalDemand software distills the interdependencies between supply and demand into mathematical models, tailored to understand and incorporate milling market conditions, capacity and transportation logistics. These mathematical models power a real-time user-interface that provides millers with actionable information needed to manage their business.

The information from the data gives ConAgra a way to optimize and create new products. With IBM, it provides a real-time view, showing the interdependencies of data to create a visual picture for what action to take

Services Angle

Facebook’s open graph aggregates the interdependencies of different pieces of information. It analyzes this data and visualizes it in a timeline. It gives the customer a way to see connections with friends and various communities.

Facebook is developing an ecosystem of app developers. The purpose is to create new ways to connect different data sources. Those connections make patterns that form an electronic weave that changes as people update their timelines and interact with the different apps.

The IBM Venture Group works with Hummer Winblad, a San Francisco venture capital firm. Hummer Winblad is an investor in SignalDemand. Through that partnership, SignalDemand and IBM realized the synergies between the two companies respective analytics capabilities. IBM’s smarter commerce ecosystem works in part by forming partnerships with young companies like SignalDemand. The integration is a bit different from the way Facebook works with its partners but similarly it’s the data that connects them.

Is Facebook disrupting markets or is it the data that people are shaping in new ways? I think its latter. Facebook and its app partners are capitalizing on data much like IBM and its partners are using information to help companies adapt to a market going through unprecedented disruptions. That’s a sea change that is spreading far beyond the streets of San Francisco.