We’ve been talking a lot about our products because there has been some incredible progress on what we’re delivering to the organizations we work with. From tip to tail, we’re changing the way users on the Namara platform access, enrich, manage, and monitor the data flowing through their environment.

But what’s the underlying stuff? At a high level, what is external data and why is it so valuable?

What is external data?

The way we see it, it’s not as easy to pin down as most assume. It seems like anything created outside your organization would count as external data, right? …

Our “INNERJOIN” series features collaborations, integrations, and thought partners. We’re offering perspectives from thought leaders in different industries to show the value, flexibility, and potential in data.

In this blog post, we host a story from the Institute for Design-Driven Analytics by Parmisse Menendez Limo, recent graduate of Humber College’s graduate certificate program in journalism, where she digs into the data that suggest why Peru’s poorest workers are less likely to contract COVID-19.

Since the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 has led Peru into a severe economic crisis in which more than 6 million Peruvians have lost their jobs between…

#ActiveTO #CycleTO #CafeTO #PhysicalDistancing. These are all familiar hashtags that we’ve seen over the summer in Toronto. The messaging is clear: “Get outside, but maintain physical distancing.” This is sound advice, indeed. Being outside can help with promoting focus, relieving anxiety, and encouraging active lifestyles.

Given that Canadian summers are short and precious, being outside allows us to soak up the much needed vitamin D! At the same time, in light of the on-going pandemic, we must continue to stay 6 feet apart to help flatten the curve and delay and/or reduce the impact of a second wave.

Ontario has…

The world as we knew it changed almost overnight — the way we socialize, communicate, and even work have all been upended. Despite the differences in how and where we work, our company has continued its rapid growth. This past summer, we on-boarded our first batch of remote co-op students. Our summer marketing intern, Arianne Frigillana, shares her experience in navigating her internship at ThinkData virtually.

Hi! I’m Arianne. This past summer, I joined the SMS Team (Sales, Marketing, and Success) at ThinkData Works as a marketing co-op student. Ready for the plot twist? …

The new reality businesses face is fairly simple: capital expenditures have been frozen and finding inefficiencies in operational expenses has become priority one.

McKinsey research found, even before the pandemic hit, that 92% of organizations thought their business models would require a significant effort in digital transformation to remain competitive.

Based on the recent and ongoing economic downturn, “spend” is a scary word. Digital transformation and data growth may take a back seat to bottom-line savings and stamping out redundancies. …

This is the first of a four-part how to series that dives into how to develop an end-to-end data strategy for your organization that solves for data at every stage of it’s lifecycle.

The problem with data being a ‘secret weapon’ is that it’s kept secret, even among teams within the same organization. It is stored in different places, managed by different people, and largely, there’s no standard way to ‘work on data’ — be that through access, transformation, or sharing.

For many companies, data ecosystems span hundreds of separate, siloed units, making it difficult to even imagine a single…

CODEX

In late December, pneumonia of unknown cause was detected in Wuhan, China. That same illness would later be declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been felt by everybody, and the ripple effects are still cascading outward.

When times are challenging, it’s often difficult to step back and appreciate the positive outcomes. Although, the coronavirus has separated us physically, it has also brought us together to build creative, innovative solutions. …

A few years ago I took a call from an analyst at a hedge fund who was looking for external data that would, in his words, provide “alpha.” I explained that our company was connected to thousands of data sources and hundreds of thousands of public datasets; I told him that we were continuously pulling in open data from 70 countries, standardizing it through an ingestion pipeline trained against the largest catalogue of public data in the world, and serving it up via a suite of APIs that plug directly into any ecosystem.

There was a brief pause and the…