Wouldn't it be great to view the internet like Ebay, Google, SpyFu do?

Makes a lot of sense. Also reminds me of what Fred Smith, the founder of Federall Express said. He says his company ships businesses very important supplies everyday and he can delay any shipment, which would delay that companies production and bottom line. All he would have to do than is to short that stock, knowing that he can halt production, cause the stock to fall and cash in. My two sense!

Huh? That is possible to almost anyone too, suffice to know where to look and what are the available tools to use so we can probe that data.

You'd have to have the capacity to compile and analyse all that data first, and then have the resources to use business intelligence tools (indeed) to elaborate plans to put that remastered data in use intelligently and strategically into profitable business models.

It's not as much the access to data, but rather the resources to put that data in USE profitably, that those giants have on hand that is not accessible to everyone.

They use business knowledge segmentation, it's as simple as that. That is simply said, they make sure that the right hand of their corp(poration) does not know what the left hand knows.

The security of a job can blind most people to oppotunity.
Most companies have no fear, just keep them comfortable, content and coming back (because of security and bills).

Good point at first glance. But on second thought, it's easy to keep the employees. Just offer them a good living wage paycheck with benefits. That'll take care of 50%.

And 40% are not marketing oriented, wouldn't know what to do with the data, or wouldn't want to face the work or ... competition.

And the other 10% have no clue nor do they care, they're just wishing the week-end would hurry up and get here.

Trust me, most companies that size know that. (Cue Evil Laugh: "Hah, Hah, Hah"!)

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I work in the business intellegence arena so I've got my view of what's going on here. The big reason that the date here does me no good is that we sell/repair fork lifts. So the business is not easily copied. The business consists of relationships between suppliers, vendors, customers etc. They are working with Walmart currently and it would take an awful lot of investment to provide what Walmart seeks.

However, when it comes to web data we are talking about a business that nearly anyone can get involved in. How could you work at these web giants and not have a view of some niche you can grab a hold of and run with? Seems impossible to me.

And when it comes to having the ability to crunch that level of data, no problem. there are many open source Big Data tools. Heck even google has a Big Data API available. It's getting your hands on the data that is the trick.

BTW, lets not forget that we all have access to AWS.

Hey Dad2Four,

I'm the founder of SpyFu. Tell me the query you want to run, I might be able to run it for you.

If it takes too much of my personal time, but you know it'd *really* profitable for you -- I have custom data team that can get it done no matter what it is. We build custom lists for people all the time; they start like $1000 (basically the cost of sale). We also have a lot of (unpublished) APIs.

Cheers,
MR

I'm not worthy.

I'm thinking.... One query? Hehe