AustinStartup

On March 12th, Infochimps, a startup data marketplace here in Austin, entered into a revenue sharing agreement with MySpace allowing the social network’s data to be available for sale on the Infochimps site.

A week later, after ReadWriteWeb wrote about the deal, a number of negative comments and ensuing articles were written, most notably a conversation thread on Slashdot.

What happened here, and what can this tell us about the possible futures for data privacy?

If you’re attending the Innotech conference at the Austin Convention Center on Thursday, here’s a brief guide to some of the great things happening during the day.
9:30am Room 11
Developing in the Cloud with Josh Baer.
Learn about cloud computing infrastructure, platforms and applications that you can leverage to reduce costs, increase reliability and improve productivity. Find [...]

It’s time again for the Beta Summit at the Austin Innotech Conference. This is the second year that I’ve had the pleasure of hosting this event, and we’ve got some great companies that are going to show you some early stage, or recently launched technologies.

Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Joseph Kelly, COO of Infochimps.
Q:  Give us the elevator pitch for your company?
Infochimps is a website to find, share, or sell any dataset in the world.  Our collection has over 5,000 datasets on topics from number of deaths in a Rambo movie to US census data.  Much of our data [...]

Yet another Austin-based company launching at DEMO this week is Infochimps. They launched a new marketplace where users can upload and sell their datasets to potential buyers such as researchers or application developers. Infochimps customers control the terms, set the price, and Infochimps handles storage, distribution and billing. Infochimps takes a commission from each sale in the marketplace and also provides a separate, free service where anyone can upload, share and curate the data on the site.

It’s the time of the season to launch companies. Between the TechCrunch50 and DEMOfall, over 100 companies are launching themselves, or products this month. Here’s a rundown of companies of interest, and we’ll have more details as they launch.

80legs – Some friends from Houston are doing some interesting things with grids.
EthicsEd – MicroAssist is launching [...]