Wow. We really do live in the midst of a tidal wave of more detailed and interesting data.
The latest: importgenius.com, the brainchild of brothers Ryan and David Petersen, with Michael Kanko. They exploit customs reporting obligations and Freedom of Information requests to organize and publish — in real-time — the contents of every shipping container entering the United States.
From importgenius.com.There’s a neat ticker on the bottom of their page showing a trickle of these data. Watch it for a few minutes: it’s mesmerizing and provides a sometimes beautiful window into the wonders of international trade.
How might these data be useful to firms? Well here’s an example: On May 23, Ryan identified a spike in imports of a new type of device from Apple, leading him to (correctly) predict the arrival of the new iPhone. Apple’s secrecy throughout its supply chain is legendary, but not even Steve Jobs dares lie to U.S. customs.
Massive shipments of a new product code led to a pretty clear inference that something was up. I can only begin to imagine the business implications of data like this.
For instance, Samsung was still readying its new “Instinct” cellphone to compete with the (first-gen) iPhone, even as these data predicted that their real target should have been the (vastly improved) second-gen iPhone.
More generally: How will the forces of competition change now that firms can track shipment volumes of their suppliers, competitors, and customers? While more data can mean stronger competition, more information can also make it easier to enforce collusive agreements. Stay tuned, this will be interesting.
I can only imagine (and hope) that there are bright economists already thinking about how these new data can be used to fine tune our understanding of the dynamics of international trade.
See also TechCrunch on ImportGenius. It is no coincidence that I have to thank Ryan’s former econ professor, Ray Fisman, for the pointer, as Ray is no stranger to analyzing detailed trade data.
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NY Bikes makes some great stuff
If this affects competitive intelligence, it might be a force that brings manufacturing jobs back to America.
They’ve built a business on continuous Freedom of Information requests? I’m more intrigued at how they continuously maintain this database by bombarding whoever handles FOI requests.
Geoff,
I don’t know the specifics, but I can imagine that they simply have some sort of standing FOI request that allows them to be linked to the Customs’ databases and thus receive information a real-time stream.
@ Geoff: I’m also extremely curious about how anyone is getting anything close to real time information through the Freedom of Information requests. That would be quite a useful trick for making our government even more transparent.
Combine shipping data from ImportGenius and market intelligence from places like iSuppli and you have a pretty good idea of what’s inside the iphone, how much it cost them, where they’re being shipped and shipping volumes.
All for 20 minutes of work. Crazy.
Calling the 2nd gen phone “vastly improved” is absurd. The main two differences are 3G support and MS Exchange support, which I imagine Samsung would have been smart enough to include – obvious deficiencies in the 1st gen iPhone. The other differences are just in lowering costs to sell it cheaper to a wider audience. I do not think anyone would think of that as vastly improved. Samsung has always been good about cost control.
I suppose some companies may use this kind of accessible data to justify creating importing shell companies or subs, just so others cannot tell who is really bringing in what.
What does the service cost?