We’re on a mission.
To help people make better decisions – you, your team, your organization, the world.
And we think that people make better decisions when they are properly informed – when they have the information, facts, figures and analysis they need to be able to make an informed decision.
We don’t lack data these days – enterprises, organizations and people are producing it at an unprecedented rate. But the data (!) says that we’re not getting the most out of it – the Harvard Business Review recently reported that marketers currently depend on data for just 11% of all customer-related decisions.
That’s why we’ve built and continue to develop BuzzData. We’ve completed Phase 1 of our mission – allowing anyone to set up a BuzzData Hive, their own place on the web to store and share important spreadsheets, other files and artifacts (links, visualizations, etc.).
Now we’re hard at work on Phase 2. We’re going to let everyone create and share smart, visual executive summaries from their data. And to help you get to the story in your data, we’re embedding a range of tools within Hives that will make it easy for anyone to interrogate, analyse and visualize data.
We want everyone to be able to manipulate data so that they can find the key facts and figures and to then be able to easily share and communicate this information with their chosen audience (what some people and businesses refer to as the “democratization of data”).
We’ll be rolling out these improvements during the rest of 2012, and we hope that you’re excited as we are by them. If you have a question or comment, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our CEO directly at tellmark@buzzdata.com.
And the short version…
BuzzData lets you create and share visual, smart executive summaries from your data. We give you the analysis and visualization tools you need to find the story in your data, and your own place on the web where you can store, share and find it. BuzzData makes it easy to move beyond files to the key facts and figures and to communicate them visually and effectively.
Everyone wants to know what the data says – so let the facts speak for themselves with BuzzData.
Who are we?
Executive Team
[tippy title="Mark Opausky" width="500" height="320"]Mark is the CEO and co-founder of BuzzData. Prior to this Mark was the CEO of BPS Inc. that grew to become a top Gartner ranked enterprise risk management software company, focused on global deployments for the investment banking community.
Mark studied engineering at McMaster University in Canada and for a MBA at Oakland University in Michigan. He was nominated as Ernst & Young – Entrepreneur of the Year in 2004 and 2005. Mark’s professional experience includes lean process management, risk management, data acquisition and software UX design, finance, operations and business development. Mark’s passions include music and film where he has been involved in numerous projects.
You can get in touch with Mark at mark@buzzdata.com.[/tippy], CEO & Co-Founder
[tippy title="Nick Edouard" width="500" height="320"]Originally an angel investor in BuzzData, Nick now oversees all business development, sales and marketing activities at BuzzData, as well as customer support and account management.
Nick spends a considerable amount of time talking with BuzzData’s actual and potential customers – companies and organizations looking to better share data (both openly with the world and internally within teams and across organizations) so that data-driven (better!) decisions get made. He recently led the Economist Intelligence Unit and BuzzData’s global Best City Contest crowdsourcing project. He regularly speaks about best practice data sharing – his 2012 speaking engagements have included the launch of the Creative Commons in Canada and the International Open Government Data Conference that was co-sponsored by the U.S. General Services Administration, Data.gov, and the World Bank.
Prior to BuzzData, Nick established and ran the North American operations of Nomad Digital, a UK-based telecom company, and delivered on-train Wi-Fi solutions for Amtrak, VIA Rail and others. He has previously co-founded the UK’s leading site management company for emerging wireless technologies and spent 5 years as a strategy consultant principally with Arthur D. Little. He thinks that his data geekery is balanced by having an MA in Classics and Philosophy from Trinity College, Oxford, but deep down he knows better.
You can get in touch with Nick at nick@buzzdata.com.[/tippy], EVP Business Development and Marketing
Board & Advisors
[tippy title="John Phillips" width="500" height="320"]John Phillips is, through Klister Credit Corp., a private equity investor focusing on early stage companies and, for many investments, a corporate director. His current board responsibilities include BuzzData, Shopify and Elevate.
He has recently completed service as a director of The Canadian Merit Scholarship Foundation and of Redknee Solutions Inc. (TSX: RKN), as well as Chair of Healthcare365 Inc. and BPSResolver Inc..
John joined Clearnet Communications Inc. in December 1994 after working with Blake, Cassels & Graydon for 20 years, where he practised business law (including corporate & project finance) and became a Partner in 1982. John served as Executive Vice President, Carrier Relations and General Counsel at Clearnet and then TELUS Mobility until December 2001. He has served as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. John has been angel investing for over a decade.
John received his B.A. from Trinity College, University of Toronto in 1971 and his law degree from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto in 1974. He and his wife, Cathy, live in Toronto, ON and Flatrock, NL.
[/tippy], Board Chairman
[tippy title="Pete Forde" width="500" height="320"]Pete Forde is an acclaimed technologist, serial entrepreneur and open source community leader. Pete was an early proponent of Ruby on Rails and Ajax web techniques. In 2004 he founded Unspace Interactive as the first dedicated Rails team in the world, with over 100 clients including the United Nations, TheScore Sports Network and dozens of start-ups.
Pete’s published articles and O’Reilly book contributions introduced or promoted ideas ranging from endless scrolling pages, live web datagrids, progressive enhancement and HTML data attributes. These concepts are now common interface patterns used by Facebook and Google, and helped to lay the groundwork for the current JavaScript MVP framework renaissance.
Pete was curator of the notorious “high-water mark” conferences RubyFringe and FutureRuby. To date Pete has hosted over 70 monthly Rails Pub Nite events in Toronto, as well as 5 Ruby hiring fairs and several high profile guest speaker events. Pete is a sought after speaker in his own right, having given talks at Strata, CUSEC, MeshU, iP3 and three different Ajax Experience conferences. Pete is the most prolific DemoCamp presenter, having presented 5 times in 7 years.
An avid traveler and occasional touring rock drummer, Pete is passionate about music and film photography.[/tippy], Board Member & Co-Founder
[tippy title="Motek W. Sherman" width="500" height="320"]Motek is a Toronto-area lawyer, investor, producer, and creative strategist, and he serves as general counsel and director of the Westmoor Group of investments. His technology portfolio is focused on what he calls “the three ‘c’s” of data management – curation, consolidation, and communication of data – for consumer and business markets.[/tippy], Board Member
[tippy title="David Eaves" width="500" height="320"]David is an open innovation, public and negotiation expert. He advises clients on open data, community management and engagement, critical negotiations and strategy. He counts among his clients the World Bank, Code for America, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Greenpeace and Mozilla. In addition to his consulting David writes at http://eaves.ca/ and is a senior editor at TechPresident.
He has been invited to keynote events such as the O’Reilly Open Source Convention and the World Bank/Data.gov International Open Government Data Conference and has been invited to speak at the Council of Foreign Relations, the White House, and the Kennedy School of Government. David lives in Vancouver, Canada.
[/tippy], Board Member & Open Data Advisor
[tippy title="Dale Richards" width="500" height="320"]Dale is currently President, North America & Head of Data Strategy for First Derivatives plc (FDP.L), and also a Managing Director of Island 20 Ventures Inc, an information strategy advisory. Prior to FDP, he was CEO / Founder at LakeFront Data Ventures, a successful specialty data industry thought leader & boutique to business leaders in the area of information & data strategy.
Prior to LakeFront, Dale was with SunGard as Chief Data Officer, President of Enterprise Data Management (EDM) and EVP Corp Development. He was personally one of the 3 founding partners of the EDM council co-sponsored with IBM with over 80 global members. Prior to SunGard, Dale was President & CEO of FAME Information Services, a Warburg-Pincus backed global time-series software and data redistribution vendor to Energy and Financial markets. Under Dale, FAME was named Top Global Data Management Vendor for 3 years in a row. Prior to FAME, Dale was Founder, President & CEO of Benton Associates, a global consulting, software solutions, data management and quantitative analytics company. Benton’s clients included major buy and sell-side firms using the “Benton Workstation”, a data analytics workbench across 1,500 desktops for pre-trade analytics and data mining.
Dale has previously held board positions with Covarity, Diaphonics, and TAP Systems, a Microsoft-based financial data platform, and he is currently on the board of the Jazz Apprenticeship Program, a NYC-based educational / mentoring program for aspiring inner city jazz kids.[/tippy], Board Member & Data Industry Advisor
News
October 1, 2012 – Data Industry Leader Dale Richards Joins BuzzData Board of Directors
BuzzData, the leading data sharing company based in Toronto, Canada, is pleased to announce the addition of Dale Richards to its Board of Directors as Data Industry Advisor. [more]
Got a thing for data and telling stories? You’d like it here.
We’re always on the lookout for great people to join the BuzzData team, both techies and non-techies.
Techies: Ruby on Rails developer with good experience (3+ years)? We should talk. We’re very nice to our developers.
Non-techies: Passionate about data and how it can be used? Sales, business development and / or marketing skill set and experience, ideally in a start-up? Awesome – sounds like you may be our cup of tea (that’s British for “we like you”).
Interns: We’re actively looking for a couple of super smart interns to help out BuzzData’s sales & marketing team, specifically to help out with the launches of some very exciting new features and products later in 2012. So if you’re in Toronto and a student or recent graduate looking for some genuinely interesting work experience that future employers will love – and there’s a good chance that employer could well be us – get in touch. Coding skills aren’t vital but being tech-savvy is and data literate would certainly be a bonus. Pay will be poor and the jokes will be bearable at best but your BuzzData experience will be awesome.
Send your resume and a short cover to jobs@buzzdata.com and we’ll be in touch.
Companies with whom we do beautiful things.
Or, as we sometimes like to call them for brevity’s sake, our partners.
OODA’s team of highly qualified data specialists and scientists use sophisticated algorithms to develop task-specific software. Manipulating information from diverse sources, we deliver customized native or web (SaaS) solutions that present data in meaningful ways.
OODA has recently developed the BullBear Index, a predictive price index for commodities mined from thousands of commodity news documents in real-time, and, and MarketSense, a multi-dimensional psychological index for predicting the stock market based on Twitter sentiment analysis.
With an extensive background in the defence intelligence sector, OODA provides unparalleled services in data analysis, acquisition, aggregation and mining, business intelligence, social network analysis, natural language processing, semantic analysis and image analysis.
