Data Bartering Is Everywhere

Noam Bardin wanted to expand the reach of his company’s mobile mapping app to South America. It was a bold idea, but an expensive one. So over the past year, Bardin, the chief executive officer of Palo Alto-based Waze, met with resellers of geographical mapping information and asked them for access to their proprietary data. The catch: The Israeli entrepreneur said that he didn’t want to pay a dime to get it.

In return, Bardin offered to trade some of the data on automobile traffic, speed traps, roadwork, and collisions that his company would collect from new South American users of its app. One of the companies, Multispectral, signed on in January, and six months later the Waze app rolled out to drivers throughout Brazil. “It would have taken us a year and a half to get there on our own,” Bardin says.