Every fall, the team at InfoCommerce Group announces their pick for the InfoCommerce Model of Excellence awards. This program profiles industry exemplars to show how real revenue is generated by selling and distributing information online. To decide what companies are selected to become a model of excellence, they scan the business information landscape to identify companies whose products – both new and established – that have important new business models, or offer technological innovation within the field of online information and highlight them as a model for other companies to emulate.
This article was first published on the InfoCommerce Group Blog.
Below are their picks for the 2015 InfoCommerce Model of Excellence, with a short summary of each. Click the PDF link to open up a detailed “Business Information Framework” report for each company, which includes detailed company information on products, ownership and other information.
PeopleTicker
Location: Delray Beach, FL
Website: www.peopleticker.com
Business Model: Subscription
About: Nearly 40% of American workers are now considered “contingent,” also known as independent contractors, consultants and temporary employees. This form of employment is large and continues to grow rapidly. But what should these workers be paid? That’s a critical piece of information necessary for employers to obtain maximum benefit from this employment model. Yet, all the traditional benchmarks of employee compensation are focused on full-time employees. Further, few of these benchmarks are both global and consistent in design. Moreover, most of these benchmarks are based on survey data that can be badly outdated.
Enter PeopleTicker, which collects salary and hourly data for both direct and contingent workers globally and in real-time, aggregating over 100 million rates. PeopleTicker obtains rate data directly from major multinational companies and government agencies, and augments this by harvesting public data from SkillsVillage, social media, and extensive web crawling. Moreover, PeopleTicker is aware of the limitations of existing salary benchmarking systems that depend on fixed, generic job descriptions and has developed an algorithmic approach to delivering more precise and relevant pay data.
PeopleTicker is noteworthy not only because it found a solution to a burgeoning employment category that required benchmark compensation data, but also for going beyond simply replicating existing survey approaches by harnessing Big Data tools and algorithmic approaches that radically improve the quality and value of the data being collected.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for PeopleTicker, click here.
Quorum
Location: Washington, DC
Website: www.quorum.us
Business Model: Subscription
About: Quorum is an online legislative strategy platform that provides legislative professionals in Washington and all 50 states access to the world’s most comprehensive database of legislative information, with quantitative insights and modern project management tools that make it easier to track legislation, build support, and take action.
Product/Services: Quorum is an online legislative strategy platform that provides legislative professionals access to the world’s most comprehensive database of legislative information, unique quantitative insights, and modern project management tools. With Quorum, users can easily search, save, comment on, and receive email alerts for all bills, votes, tweets, press releases, floor statements, caucuses, committees, and staff contact information from the U.S. Congress and all 50 state legislatures.
Quorum’s advanced quantitative analytics provide information on each legislator’s top issues, most frequent collaborators, ideology, voting history, and legislative effectiveness. By enabling users to easily log meetings, clearly highlight differences between bills, create legislative spreadsheets, and quickly email multiple legislators and congressional staff, Quorum’s productivity features save users valuable time.
Quorum’s comprehensive data, quantitative insights, and 21st-century productivity tools are changing the way people track legislation, build support, and take action.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for Quorum, click here.
Parking Panda
Location: Baltimore, MD
Website: www.parkingpanda.com
Business Model: Advertising & Sponsorship
About: Founded in 2011, Parking Panda helps consumers commute smarter by offering online parking reservations in advance. Parking Panda customers know before they go, as they are equipped with the ability to search and compare thousands of parking options and price in more than 40 cities nationwide. Drivers can easily reserve guaranteed parking spaces in advance at parking lots, garages and valets in their city, or they can find and book parking on-the-go with the company’s award-winning mobile app for iOS and Android. Parking Panda continues to create a frictionless parking experience through its PandaScan technology, providing consumers a scanin/out ability to even redeeming a reservation from a garage’s pay station system.
Product/Services: On the consumer side, Parking Panda offers a simple and free app that helps the commuting consumer locate parking near their preferred destinations. Parking Panda further streamlines the consumer’s parking experience by providing real-time parking availability, the ability to compare prices, as well as the option to reserve and pay for a parking spot-all in one app. PandaScan, the company’s automated technology, gives drivers a hassle-free scan-in/out ability via the company’s proprietary hardware, continuing to streamline access and egress from a parking facility.
For operators of parking facilities, Parking Panda is a search engine of available parking inventory in more than 40 cities nationwide. Operators can adjust prices in real-time to reflect demand and fill a higher percentage of available parking spots. Parking Panda offers a powerful, sophisticated set of online tools and analytics that can be used for management and optimization, as well as the ability to expand in the company’s additional products and services. Parking Panda’s PandaScan is an exclusive technology that includes an array of automated technology from the ability to scan in/out of the garage to even redeeming a reservation from a pay station system. Other tools include Parking Panda’s P3OS, the operator’s ultimate solution to managing event
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for Parking Panda, click here.
Trucker Path
Location: San Jose, CA
Website: www.truckerpath.com
Business Model: Advertising & Sponsorship
About: Trucker Path launched with a free app for truckers containing map-based, crowdsourced listings of key travel locations for truckers, such as weigh stations, truck stops, rest areas and more. With over 300,000 app users, the company is leveraging this base to launch a new trucking marketplace to match freight to available trucks.
Product/Services: Trucker Path fills a real need in a large and important market: trucking. It provides truckers with a free app that helps them easily locate truck stops, rest areas, weigh stations, parking, truck washes and more, many with user reviews. The app utilizes a map-based interface and relies on crowdsourced data that its user community has a real interest in keeping current.
The free app is monetized through advertising. Advertisers can not only highlight themselves, but provide special offers as well. Users are alerted to advertiser offers based on proximity.
Having rapidly grown to 300,000 users of the free app, Trucker Path is now launching a trucking marketplace to help connect truckers to available freight shipments, adding important trust features such as credit, insurance and license data. The marketplace was not developed as disintermediation play: rather as an efficiency tool for freight brokers and shippers.
Trucker Path is not only a testament to the power of crowdsourcing and a well-designed app, but to the power of using a free app to provide needed, but basic, information to quickly build a large audience that can be leveraged to launch more complex and lucrative products, once brand and credibility are established.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for Trucker Path, click here.
Site Zeus
Location: Tampa, FL
Website: www.sitezeus.com
Business Model: Subscription, Advertising, Sponsorship
Subscription Model: Services are available on a subscription basis.
About: SiteZeus offers a data-driven analytics platform for retail site selection. The platform relies on input data from the customer’s existing retail locations to provide true predictive analytics.
Product/Services: Analytics tools for retail site selection are not new. SiteZeus however, is upping the ante in a number of ways. First, it aims to be a predictive platform: users supply data on the performance of their existing sites and SiteZeus finds patterns and can pinpoint other locations with high probability of success using innovative heatmaps. SiteZeus also leverages Big Data practices to bring in demographic, psychographic and transactional data from a variety of sources such as Nielsen, Acxiom, credit card data, climate data, point of interest data – right down to such small but critical details as parking lot access. SiteZeus even factors in the presence of nearby competitors to its overall assessment.
The business model of SiteZeus is innovative as well. It charges a variable success fee to users: $1 per square foot for the site ultimately selected. In addition, in a somewhat risky move, the fee is waived if you use a commercial brokerage services operated by the company. Keeping the two services at arms-length is critical, but SiteZeus appears to understand this right out of the gate.
While a new venture, SiteZeus has already back-tested its recommendations and found strong evidence for the quality of its recommendations.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for SiteZeus, click here.
FAIR Health
Location: New York, NY
Website: www.fairhealth.org
Business Model: Free – Not for Profit
About: FAIR Health seeks to provide more transparency into healthcare costs by aggregating and normalizing data from billions of medical and dental claims, providing not only a free consumer website to access these data, but also objective industry pricing benchmarks and powerful analytical insights.
Product/Services: FAIR Health collects claims payment data from insurance companies and other payers nationwide. With the addition of some licensed data, FAIR Health can then help consumers determine the average cost of medical and dental procedures at the zip code level. It’s not the final answer in healthcare price transparency, but it’s a huge step forward in an industry that doesn’t like to publish or even discuss its pricing. FAIR Health currently aggregates over 18 billion individual claims.
In addition to the free consumer site, FAIR Health also licenses its data for use on health exchanges, and it is used by insurers to determine fair prices (also called “usual and customary fees”) for out-of-network health procedures, and to aid in contract negotiations with healthcare providers. FAIR Health also offers deep discounts to insurers who contribute data.
By so effectively aggregating and organizing multiple data sources to provide industry pricing benchmarks, FAIR Health effectively serves as a central clearinghouse for pricing data for the entire healthcare industry.
To view the InfoCommerce Group Business Information Framework for FAIR Health, click here.
Russell Perkins, our INSIDER Guide to Data Publishing Strategy, is the Founder and Managing Director of InfoCommerce Group (ICG). InfoCommerce Group is a boutique consultancy serving the global business information industry, with expertise in commercial data products focused on corporate and product data strategy, new data product development, assessment of existing products to help accelerate growth (or stem declines), and acquisition due diligence. (Read Russell’s full Bio)
