I’ve just finished writing my regular column for this month’s Business Money magazine, this time on the topic of “2020 Vision – The Next Decade”. However, in order to accommodate the sub-headings required in the interests of clarity, I have had to ‘lose’ a paragraph .

I have retrieved the ‘lost paragraph’ and have posted it in full below as well as  expanding on a few of the discussion points it raises:

Many comparison sites and product directories scour the Web in order to assemble data on particular topics. They aggregate the data and present it in a  templated ‘at-a-glance’ format to facilitate customer choice.

These ‘accumulated pools of data’ have the potential to form the raw material for alternative information-based business opportunities. Importantly, these by-products may yield powerful, actionable information for even more profitable applications.

The one caveat here is that the sword can cut both ways; today’s Web-based aggregators which lack strong brands and value propositions may well find themselves aggregated tomorrow.

However, by way of illustration, McKinsey describes a scenario as to how these same principles can be applied very successfully to proprietary information: “A retailer using digital cameras to prevent shoplifting could also analyze the shopping patterns and traffic flows of customers through its stores and could also use these insights to improve its layout or placement of promotional displays. It might also sell the data to its vendors so that they could use real observations of consumer behavior to reshape their merchandising approaches.”

Rich Barton, the founder of Zillow,  describes the above process somewhat prosaically as shining “a light up into the dark reaches of the supply curve.”

What information do you have that once ‘repurposed’ would illuminate a new business opportunity or solve a business information need for your clients?