Doing data mining for other companies, have helped the data mining companies in many ways besides the services that they offer. In some cases, they have made several new businesses. There are two examples that are mentioned in “Big Data – A revolution” by Victor Mayer-Schoneberger and Kenneth Cukier
In Amazon early days, Amazon made a deal with AOL to run the e-commerce for AOL’s e-commerce website. This looked like a traditional deal with the company offering its services for a fee for service. However, what was important to Amazon was looking at the AOL’s data on what the consumers were buying after looking at the products and making a decision. This was critical in making the recommendation engine work, that enabled Amazon to gain such an advantage in the marketplace. Using the data was something that Amazon knew how to use and harvested for their purpose.
Similarly, Nuance technology is very good at speech recognition, and Google setup an agreement with Nuance technology to enable its GOOG-411 engine for service but also to keep the translation records. This enabled Google to setup their own translational engine now that it had all the data. The interesting part of the story is that Nuance realized the value of data and started offering the service but in addition combined it with access to the data that it could use.