When storage is cheap, finding data has value. A $600 hard drive can store all of the world's music so how do you find a song you like?
Math can answer those mysteries, says Kaggle president and chief scientist Jeremy Howard, and in a world of information overload, people who understand making sense of data madness will be paid like rock stars - or athletes. So they are starting now.
The San Francisco startup wants to create a sport for intelligent people. With the whole world of data at your hands, who can find the best answer will become the stuff of pop culture fame - kind of like a Kardashian, except smart.
For instance, which color used car is least likely to be a lemon? Not which color car is most popular, that is an easy one (white), but rather which color used car is least likely to give you problems. If you used a search engine and said 'orange' it's only because that is one of the contests Kaggle sponsored - their goal is to create a new sport based on predictive modeling competitions.
Competitive number crunching in a world full of data takes some serious math skills.
The Internet is the great equalizer when it comes to data, we believe, but people have a competitive streak and a desire to excel, even in things we might not yet think of as games of skill. So Kaggle are creating the new games. Statisticians are already in demand - everything from global warming to Wall Street demands understanding numerical models - and Kaggle founder Anthony Goldbloom had the brainchild to turn data-mining into a crowdsourced contest. "We want to see the best data scientists earning more than Tiger Woods," Goldbloom told Marcus Wohlsen of Associated Press.
Goldbloom believes what we at Science 2.0 believe - relying on a small group of internal people means it will be hard to know if the answer is the best. Everyone else can pay the same people. But crowdsourcing is eerily accurate. The cool thing about Kaggle is you know how you did immediately. Since the contests last for months, you can keep trying.
Are businesses interested? Sure. Heritage Provider Network medical group is offering $3,000,000 through Kaggle to whoever can use hospital admission records to best predict which people will most likely end up in the hospital.
