Applying design thinking to data

Design thinking has been around since the 1960’s, but it really started gain influence in the early 90’s, when IDEO developed its design process grounded in problem solving and empathic thinking. IDEO is generally credited with bringing design thinking out of academia at the Stanford Design School (also known as d.school) and into the mainstream.

What does e-commerce for data really mean?

Transparency The way that data is sold today is extremely opaque. Unlike Software-as-a-Service companies (Slack, Stripe, Shopify, etc.), Data-as-a-Service companies almost never put their pricing on their website (SafeGraph is a stark exception). In fact, most don’t even put much about their product on their website. Instead, DaaS companies or companies that sell data “on

Getting Started

1.  Getting data into Syndetic The first step in building your data shop is to get the data to us. By connecting to your data, we automatically generate your shop and keep it up to date so your customers never get stale data. You have a few options: S3 We will create an S3 bucket for

Data vendor tear sheets and why they matter

In our last post, we explored how the meaning and importance of data dictionaries have changed over time. 20 years ago, a data dictionary referred to a list of field names and types spit out by a database. Now, a data dictionary serves as a sort of spec sheet for a dataset: it must be

Why does everyone hate their data dictionary?

Why does everyone hate their data dictionary? A sort of meta-spreadsheet, a data dictionary on its face sounds like a relatively simple thing. It is a document describing the meaning of a dataset. Typically this includes field names and types (e.g. integer, unicode, float) and maybe some annotations that describe the lineage of the data (where did it come from) and the business definition. But as with many workflows that are captured in spreadsheets, things can go awry very quickly.

Introducing Syndetic

At Syndetic we make software for data companies. Syndetic literally means connective. It comes from the Greek word syndetikos, which means to bind together. We chose this name because data is connective. While it has become a cliche that data is the new oil, we actually see data as the connective tissue that binds companies to each