I'm sure there's a host of businesses like this, but I don't know who the customer base is. $1k/m seems to be a lot, but I don't have a need!
I've had several ideas sort of like this over the years in areas/industries where it hadn't been done yet, but I'm always somewhat scared of running into copyright law issues. In other words, the data isn't mine, but if I gather it, transform it, and repackage it, it would likely be useful to people and certainly more useful than in its current raw form. But again, the data came from elsewhere.
In this case, as someone else mentioned, they likely just scraped other states'/private power companies'/rural cooperatives' maps or websites to get the data. How is that not problematic?
I understand that larger companies do this all the time, but isn't the risk pretty large for smaller entities?
*Edit* - I see I didn't read far enough to see that you guys are saying that you are often working directly with the utility companies etc. But the question still stands. I understand that some things where data is pulled are just attempts to get paid for other people's data, but some are not - some, like this, legitimately add value via visualization, aggregation, and transformation. I'm talking about things like the latter case.
[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/08/kalzumeus-podcast-4-sto...
Additionally, even as a residential customer, my utility reaches out to me when they suspect there's an outage...
But what do they do then? Call around to every nearby store asking if they still have power, and have space in cold storage? While those stores may well be calling yet other stores?
How does that work when there are 6 affected stores and 12 nearby ones that still have power? Maybe 3 of those have lots of cold storage, and another 4 have some but not lots free.
A centralized view could easily be worth $1k/month.
(and you are very fortunate if your utility reaches out to you in mass outages (>1000 customers), and especially if they do it via API your systems can act on)
And those individual stores report to centralized ops. This is a terrible usecase
A grocery chain will see maybe one outage in 10 years that is bad enough to take out the store and internet+cell phone networks.
Dispatching someone is absolutely more cost effective for these rare occasions.
But the ISP case definitely is a valid case for 1k/month.
I could see a "smart" corporate operation that detects the outages and starts to enact plans to tentatively start moving equipment around depending on predicted outage duration. Then again, I could also see where that would be deemed too expensive to do, and this is just a tech fantasy.
Many grocery stores rely on short notice rental of refrigerated semi trailers rather than the ongoing maintenance / testing of generators.
People always think generators are an easy solution, but that tends to be the response from people that have not actually looked into what generator solutions look like
If you had property adjacent to a power plant they would happily lease space to setup sensors.
Apparently there are tons of businesses like this gathering data that is mostly live and selling to hedge funds etc.
Yea, we technically had the data to figure that out ourselves but the platform hadnt been built with that in mind and this would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price for an engineer to refactor everything to get the data and thats only if they succeeded in the task
Edit: would have probably taken 3-4 years at this price _to break even_