Comments on: Amazon Gets into the Public Data Sets Game http://www.kirix.com/blog/2008/12/04/amazon-gets-into-the-public-data-sets-game/ The Official Kirix Weblog Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:49:55 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.3 By: AWS Public Data Sets Continues to Expand | Data and the Web http://www.kirix.com/blog/2008/12/04/amazon-gets-into-the-public-data-sets-game/#comment-2161 AWS Public Data Sets Continues to Expand | Data and the Web Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:02:55 +0000 http://www.kirix.com/blog/2008/12/04/amazon-gets-into-the-public-data-sets-game/#comment-2161 [...] we posted some information on Amazon’s foray into making huge public data sets available to users of their web services.  Yesterday they announced the addition of some very sizable [...] […] we posted some information on Amazon’s foray into making huge public data sets available to users of their web services.  Yesterday they announced the addition of some very sizable […]

]]> By: Ken Kaczmarek http://www.kirix.com/blog/2008/12/04/amazon-gets-into-the-public-data-sets-game/#comment-1753 Ken Kaczmarek Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:26:57 +0000 http://www.kirix.com/blog/2008/12/04/amazon-gets-into-the-public-data-sets-game/#comment-1753 Hi Garrett, Thanks for posting about your EC2 experience -- sounds like it hits the nail on the head. Your InfoPogo site looks interesting. I'll bookmark it and look forward to see how it progresses in the coming months. Hi Garrett,

Thanks for posting about your EC2 experience — sounds like it hits the nail on the head. Your InfoPogo site looks interesting. I’ll bookmark it and look forward to see how it progresses in the coming months.

]]> By: Garrett McAulife http://www.kirix.com/blog/2008/12/04/amazon-gets-into-the-public-data-sets-game/#comment-1752 Garrett McAulife Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:40:24 +0000 http://www.kirix.com/blog/2008/12/04/amazon-gets-into-the-public-data-sets-game/#comment-1752 We've played with their census data a bit. The real benefit is that it saves you a **LOT** of time from having to download it from Census.gov's FTP site (i.e instead of taking 10's of hours to get the full census data sets, you can have the data up and running on a server in literally less than 5 minutes). That said, you still have to do all the number crunching, modifications, correlations, etc. yourself (using an EC2 instance). But, since you pay by the hour for an EC2 instance, and can have the data back in minutes -- it's possible to use the data for a few hours, pay less than a dollar for that time, then turn off your EC2 instance, go home, and have the data back up and running in a few minutes the next day. That's pretty cool -- and I believe it will spur some pretty cool innovation on Amazon's cloud... We're hosting a subset of the census data right now on our product (hosted on EC2/EBS/S3). We've taken the data and made it so that consumers can see it directly on a web site. We just posted it on Friday, and have a long way to go to make it pretty and usable, but if you're interested in Census/Crime/Demographic type data, you can get a sneak peek here: http://www.infopogo.com We’ve played with their census data a bit. The real benefit is that it saves you a **LOT** of time from having to download it from Census.gov’s FTP site (i.e instead of taking 10’s of hours to get the full census data sets, you can have the data up and running on a server in literally less than 5 minutes).

That said, you still have to do all the number crunching, modifications, correlations, etc. yourself (using an EC2 instance). But, since you pay by the hour for an EC2 instance, and can have the data back in minutes — it’s possible to use the data for a few hours, pay less than a dollar for that time, then turn off your EC2 instance, go home, and have the data back up and running in a few minutes the next day. That’s pretty cool — and I believe it will spur some pretty cool innovation on Amazon’s cloud…

We’re hosting a subset of the census data right now on our product (hosted on EC2/EBS/S3). We’ve taken the data and made it so that consumers can see it directly on a web site. We just posted it on Friday, and have a long way to go to make it pretty and usable, but if you’re interested in Census/Crime/Demographic type data, you can get a sneak peek here: http://www.infopogo.com

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