(gigaom.com) -- Intel doesn’t see money in the blending of personal data with publicly available data sets, not yet, anyway. But the chip maker does suspect that a market could form around that sort of behavior down the line. That’s why the company has been backing several initiatives around data lately, from wethedata.org to the upcoming National Day of Civic Hacking. It also introduced its own version of Hadoop. Much of these projects are targeted at democratizing data, a major goal of which is to make data easily accessible for large swaths of people.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that a big company like Intel retains ethnographers, anthropologists and other social scientists on staff. Those people, who work inside Intel’s Interaction and Experience Research Lab, study how people around the world use technology and how technology affects cultures.
Lately, the researchers have been exploring the implications of the changing role of data in the computing ecosystem. The idea is to figure out how the growing openness of data from companies and governments could present business opportunities for Intel, said Brandon Barnett, director of business innovation at Intel.
It’s only natural that this is a bit amorphous — Intel doesn’t know exactly what will come out of it all. But as it throws support behind data-democratization efforts, the company has in mind a few use cases that hint at where commercialization could come in to play.
It’s nice to see that Intel has ordinary people in mind, at least for now. It’s interested in constructing applications for lots of people to understand their own data and put it in context with outside data that’s narrowly tailored, “so we don’t end up with a bunch of hackers across the country coming up with better visualization tools,” Barnett said.
Of course, more public-private data mixing and analyzing could bring about the need for more computing power, and Intel wants to be ready if and when that situation arises. Currently available chips might be up for the job, or maybe a new model will be warranted. Intel has shown willingness to make custom chips for a single webscale company, Facebook, so delivering special equipment to fit a growing use case might not be unthinkable, assuming the scale is there.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Andrea Danti.
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