Can oddball metrics from Craigslist apartment listings, Subway ridership tallies, Broadway ticket sales, city parking garage count of empty stalls, cardboard box production, or diesel fuel consumption be better economic predictors than traditional, months old government reports from the labor department? Absolutely!
The Wall Street Journal just published “New Ways to Read Economy – Experts Scour Oddball Data to Help See Trends Before Official Information Is Available” where author Cari Tuna provides numerous examples of Economists around the country using non-traditional methods to better predict economic trends and direction.
The reason for this trend is that traditional reports and data are out of date and often not very accurate. Who has six months to wait for a government report to make a decision?
Enter Web Data Services
What would make these oddball metrics more valuable and accurate? Automating the collection process over multiple sources of data and loading it in to the database or BI tool of your choice.
Imagine you had the ability to automate the monitoring of hundreds of sources of data in real time and could react to changes overnight? What data would you monitor?
Interest rates? Gold Prices? Credit Score reports? Salesforce data? Apartment listings? Competitor’s pricing? Product Buzz? Customer complaints? Financial transactions? Bank balances? Twitter? Facebook? Google Trends? Linkedin profiles? Partner inventory? Shipment dates?
If you can see it in a web browser, whether on the public web, behind a login screen, or behind your firewall, that data can be accessed with Web Data Services to provide you with improved predictive analytics and strategic decision making.
As a fun example, Reality Buzz uses Kapow’s Web Data Server to monitor popular social media sites to evaluate America’s sentiment towards contestants on American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. Overnight, data is collected and evaluated, and predictions are made about the fate of the contestants before the elimination show the following night.
Hundreds of businesses incorporate Kapow’s Web Data Server solutions to improve competitiveness, product offerings, and strategic decision making. You can too. What are you waiting for?
By: Rick Kawamura 
