The world is slowly being filled with open data (at last!). More and more organizations are understanding the need and usefulness of opening up data sets. But when we talk open data, we tend to think -only- in public administrations and non-profit organizations making their data accessible. But what about private companies? Wouldn’t them also benefit from people reusing that data, their creativity and ideas, the creation of ecosystems, and the whole lot?
Welcome global bank BBVA (with origins in Spain but presence in 31 countries, including most of Latin America and the United States), who believes in open data, APIs, and the reutilization of customer information as important elements. To start testing this waters, they have launched the InnovaChallengeMX contest.
The aim is to promote an open culture of exchange between the bank and developer communities throughout the world. CartoDB will be partnering, providing technical support, publishing posts and webcasts in the challenge platform and, of course, giving access to its infrastructure to the participants.
BBVA is opening an API to access information about credit card transacations between November 2013 and April 2014 in the Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey (representing more than 20 million people!). You can access now the API (information is dissociated, irreversible and aggregated data in order to preserve individual and bussiness privacy).
A practical use case of this API is this visualization of the economic impact of the MWC in Barcelona, made using CartoDB.
In the bbvaopen4u.com site you can checkout several posts about open data in México, data visualization, how-tos, CartoDB… In addition to that, don’t miss our webinars (many of them in Spanish):
Next webinars
- Jesús Cepeda will be talking about their visualization projects inside CIC (Oct 21st, 12 CDT)
- Javier Garduño will talk about open data projects at ITPD (Oct 23rd, 12 CDT)
- Marcelo Soria will talk about Big Data services in BBVA (Oct 28th, 11 CDT)
- Jorge Arévalo will talk about geospatial APIs and CartoDB (Oct 30th, 12 CDT)
- Rebecca Williams will talk about opening data in Data.gov (in English, Nov 04th 12 CDT)
- Juan Murillo will talk about BBVA Data & Analytics (Nov 5th, 11 CDT)
- Lilia Saúl will talk about finantial data journalism (Nov 6th, 12 CDT)
Past (and recorded!) webinars
- Alberto Cairo: Data visualization webinar
- Omar Mendoza: UX and design
- Introduction to the API
- Introduction to CartoDB
All info and materials about the contest in bbvaopen4u.com