PredictHQ meshes event data with machine learning to help airlines forecast demand

Big data has emerged as a lucrative by-product of the digital revolution, enabled by vast banks of information collated from the likes of smartphones, sensor networks, and cloud-based apps and databases. Deriving meaningful insights from this data can help cities figure out the real-time flow of people and traffic, for example, or enable life insurance providers to establish more accurate mortality rates. Extracting meaning from big data through analytics is estimated to be a $200 billion industry today, according to recent IDC numbers. It's against this backdrop that PredictHQ has come to fruition, offering a purpose-built data-aggregation platform that takes information from myriad sources related to events (public holidays, concerts, festivals, etc), meshes it with more "hard to find" data, adds a little machine learning to the mix, and sells it to third-party companies via an application programming interface (API). PredictHQ emerged from stealth last year with $10 million in funding and a host of big-name clients.