Courtesy of Financial Times

"What helps to understand [big data] better is to think of it in terms of data being the raw material, like coal or oil, that you get out of the ground and then there are lots of different data refineries that can start to refine that data in order to create higher priced products," said Bjoern Herrmann, chief executive of Startup Genome.

ABOARD THE STARTUP TRAIN - Big Data is the latest tech concept you can't avoid, and on Wednesday it cropped up on a train travelling from Toronto to Montreal for the International Startup Festival.

Every time you enter information about yourself on the Internet, it adds another layer to already-massive mountains of data, fuelling the phenomenon known broadly as Big Data.

Facebook Inc., for instance, collects information about its users to sell advertising, and startup companies are increasingly tapping into the trend, pinpointing their own opportunities to turn raw data into useable and valuable information.

Aboard the Startup Train - a rail car full of budding entrepreneurs, investors and mentors organized by Brydon Gilliss of the Guelph, Ont.-based co-working group ThreeFortyNine - were several startups with businesses based on the concept of Big Data.

Alison Gibbins, CEO of Simplify Analytics Inc., launched a beta version of her website BabySimplify.com during the five-hour train trip.

"It helps expectant parents figure out what they need and don't need for their baby. We do that with an interactive survey and we use predictive analytics to determine their essentials, their nice-to-haves and their not-for-yous," Ms. Gibbins said.

Also on the train were Lee Bremer and Faizal Karmali, co-founders of Quinzee, a platform that lets users with smart meters in their homes monitor their day-to-day energy consumption.

"Ontario's leading the charge globally with installation of smart meters so there's all this data being collected about people's energy use in real time that the utilities are starting to give back to the consumers to empower them but haven't found the best way to do it," Mr. Karmali said.

Using a combination of the smart meter data and personalized customer information, the Quinzee software provides benchmarks on where they stand compared to similar households in their neighbourhood and helps them decide when it is most cost-effective to run a load of laundry, for example.

"We realized there was a big mass of data sitting there that should be empowering the average Ontarian to make better decisions about their energy use," Mr. Karmali said.

At the festival itself, which runs from Wednesday evening to Friday, several speakers will touch on Big Data.

"What helps to understand the space better is to think of it in terms of data being the raw material, like coal or oil that you get out of the ground, and then there are lots of different data refineries that can start to refine that data in order to create higher-priced products," said Bjoern Herrmann, chief executive of Startup Genome.

His Palo Alto, Calif.-based company collects data from startup businesses on key performance indicators such as the costs of user acquisition and retention and uses an automated process to sift through the data and turn it into reports the startups can use to evaluate their relative strengths and weaknesses.

"The ability to allocate resources properly is very much driven by your ability to process signals that are coming from the market and coming from your own company," said Mr. Herrmann, who presents on Thursday at the festival.

He noted that if a company realized it was spending more than others on user acquisition but less on retention, it might put more resources into improving the product.

More than 20,000 companies worldwide are using Startup Genome, he said, and a platform for investors looking for the right moment to invest in a startup is in beta testing.

Jonathan Gosier, founder of Philadelphia-based MetaLayer Inc., recognized the power in harnessing data when he was working in East Africa and got involved with Ushahidi, a group that was mapping citizen response during crisis events to try to validate real-time information people were posting on social media.

Mr. Gosier, who is also speaking Thursday at the Startup Festival, said he saw a larger opportunity in data beyond the issue of validation.

"Data technologies in general elude the reach of organizations in terms of what they cost or how sophisticated they are to use."

The platform he and his team at MetaLayer developed uses drag-and-drop technology to let anyone in a business analyze data, not just the data scientists, who are hard to come by and expensive.

"We want to give people the equivalent of a calculator for data science," he said.