Data-As-A-Service with Auren Hoffman

Data-as-a-service businesses offer paid access to data sets. These data sets can be useful for building products or training machine learning models. 

There has been steady growth in the tools and practices around processing and storing data. But access to data sets remains a bottleneck for widespread development of machine learning applications in a large set of domains. 

SafeGraph is a company focused on the problem of data-as-a-service. Today, SafeGraph’s primary product is reliable, up-to-date location information on places. The data for these points-of-interest needs be acquired, verified, cleaned, made accessible through an API, and intelligently priced. 

In previous episodes with SafeGraph, we have explored the basic premise of data businesses and why they are important platforms for building futuristic data products that are impossible for entrepreneurs to build today. SafeGraph CEO Auren Hoffman returns to the show to discuss the data as a service business model.

Software-as-a-service has existed as a category for more than a decade. Infrastructure-as-a-service has existed for just as long. Data-as-a-service is much more undeveloped. Auren recently published the “Data-As-A-Service Bible: Everything You Wanted To Know About Running A DaaS Business”. This was a very useful article, as it breaks down a category of software that is almost entirely unexplored.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. We recently launched GitHub integrations. It’s easier than ever to find collaborators for your open source projects. And if you are looking for some people to start a project with, FindCollabs we have topic rooms that allow you to find other people who are interested in a particular technology, so that you can find people who are curious about React, or cryptocurrencies, or Kubernetes, or whatever you want to build with.
• Podsheets is an open source podcast hosting platform that we recently launched. We are building Podsheets with the learnings from Software Engineering Daily, and our goal is to be the best place to host and monetize your podcast. If you have been thinking about starting a podcast, check out podsheets.com.
• New SEDaily app for iOS and for Android. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. I’ll be commenting on each episode, so if you hear an episode that you have some commentary on, jump onto the app, or on SoftwareDaily.com to share your thoughts. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe. Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out. 

Transcript

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.