"Wanna Build Your Own Google? Visit the App Store for Algorithms"

From Wired:

 

Today’s internet is ruled by algorithms. These mathematical creations determine what you see in your Facebook feed, what movies Netflix recommends to you, and what ads you see in your Gmail. Engineers at companies like Facebook and Google spend huge amounts of time developing new algorithms—and tweaking old ones. Yet some academic computer science researchers spend years developing algorithms that are seldom seen outside of academia—even if they could be of great use to engineers in the private sector.

Diego Oppenheimer was all too aware of this as a program manager at Microsoft, where he helped design data analysis features for tools such as Excel and Power Pivot. He was always searching for better algorithms to integrate into these applications, and often found the answers he needed at Microsoft Research, the company’s blue-sky research division. “I would find that people had been working on these algorithms for years, but we’d never heard of them,” he says.


Meanwhile, Oppenheimer’s college friend Kenny Daniel was working on his PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Southern California. He had published multiple algorithms that were well received by academics, but had little chance of making their way into real-world applications. So the two of them teamed up to solve their mutual problem. Their answer is Algorithmia, which is essentially an “app store” for algorithms.

The idea is to give algorithm creators the chance to have their work used in the real-world, and get paid for it, while making it easier for companies that don’t have the resources of Microsoft or Google to tap into the world of algorithm development and find the best solutions to their problems.

There are a few other algorithm marketplaces out there already, including DataXu, which offers algorithms for ad placement, SnapAnalytics, which specializes in selling pre-made predictive models, and LumenData’s Algorithms.io, which focuses on machine learning algorithms. But Algorithmia is different in that it will accept and sell any type of algorithm.
 

How It Works Creating an algorithm market is more complicated than it might sound. Oppenheimer explains that even if you find an algorithm you want to use in an academic paper, it’s often difficult to actually implement it. Licensing the use of the algorithm to customers is a challenge as well....MORE