Reverse Market Research
Posted by goodmind on July 12th, 2007
Wesabe is community site that harnesses the collective financial wisdom of its members, with one small twist. Instead of Joe Schmoe providing unsolicited investment advice, Wesabe’s collective wisdom is the result of a more formal aggregation and analysis of members’ personal financial data. Wesabe notes any spending patterns among site users, and uses personal information (rendered anonymous) to make sweeping recommendations on getting the most bang for your buck.
Always looking to improve the financial sector, Wesabe now allows programmers to create their own hacks for use on the site;
“With the release of this API, we’re adding tools to help you automatically download and manipulate that data, too. As a result, we’re not just providing an API for our own site, but also for all the bank and credit card sites that Wesabe supports, as well. Since Wesabe supports banks and credit cards in over 30 countries around the world, we’re effectively providing developers everywhere a way to unlock data from their financial institutions and put that data to work.”
Wesabe was founded on a philosophy of attaining equilibrium in the balance of information and power between consumers and businesses. Since most businesses possess customer demographic data down to the specific minutiae, it does seem only fair. Since our business is finding and providing this demographic data, we feel slightly accountable for the current imbalance, and somewhat obligated to create our own Wesabe tool.
(via Boing Boing)
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