fintasticData Digital Market

When a digital work of art sold for 50m pounds earlier this year, I thought to myself, i know people who can connect to data on the web, or contained within API’s. They could even type data, do calculations, present and visualize that data, make it interactive…. So why cant we help these developers and creators make their own artworks? Something with a little more function and purpose powered by data?

Since the start of the COVID era, so much has changed. So much has flipped on its head. So much has been thrown into chaos. Coming from South Africa, we are faced with high unemployment and a struggling economy, and government. We're also dealing with households adjusting to impacts of COVID. These includes having to cope with the loss of loved ones, living life in a smaller box, losing incomes, closing of industries, jobs are few and scarce, having to live off grants, working and getting paid for fewer hours due to curfews, the closing of schools, restricting the already restricted lives of children wherein they interact with other kids less frequently, the rising cost of living, and so much more. The outlook in South Africa is bleak.

Having said that, fintastic Data (fD) started in April 2021 with a particular goal. Our company would work with financial data obtained through APIs and on the web. We would extract, transform, package and sell this data. The mission was to do this by ourselves as a company.

As time progressed, we began to question our purpose. Is it to help ourselves, or to help as many as we possibly can? We clearly side with being for the benefit of the many. The aforementioned COVID impacts, impacts on us as well. If people close to us are encountering difficult times, we prefer to try and lift them up as well. It is impossible to ignore our circumstances.

Within the darkness, there is a light, and we want that light to shine brighter and over all of us. With this in sight, and with the evolutions taking place, we have decided to change our approach from being the developer and creator, to being a market for developers and creators.

The market for developers and creators serves to provide opportunities for many tech savvy people to build and develop digital data (DDs) products and offer these for sale. We views DDs as being a massive opportunity for developers and teams to build useful data driven products and offer to the market. These includes building dashboards and offering these for sales. Building infographics, creating reports using big data, providing starter kits for users to uses at their own convenience and more. These starter kits could include scripts, data and dashboards.

Areas of interest for digital data products include:

• Financial data for stocks

• Crypto market data

• Social Media data

• Healthcare data

• Government data: https://data.vulekamali.gov.za/about

• Energy consumption

• Location analytics using APIs like foursquare and google amongst others

• Sports data

• the UN 17 Social Development goals: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/database/

There are free and open dashboard tools out there. We will share what these are and also provide education around this so that as many people as possible can get involved and start building their own DD creations.

Look forward to the launch of the Creators program soon. Herein Creators can sign up and start publishing their creations. Adding DDs to the fD store will be a straight forward process and we always have our finTasticos at hand to help where needed!