But outside of some whiz-bang technical stuff, there are also hundreds of million of people with access to the internet and a desire to get more information about something as esoteric as PHACE syndrome or as common as depression. Add thousands of medical research papers and descriptions about diseases and treatments available via the National Library of Medicine for free, and you have a business opportunity.

Making meaning from medical research

When Jay Bartot and Derek Streat decided started Medify in 2010 the goal was to use those free research papers to train a machine learning algorithms how to deliver intelligible information to health queries from the masses. Bartot, who had co-founded Farecast, a startup that built a predictive algorithm to tell users the best time to buy airplane tickets, decided to take his knowledge of prediction to the health world after his own family’s brush with a medical problem.

In May, Medify was purchased by Alliance Health Networks a Salt Lake City, Utah-based startup that has built out a community of 1.5 million people who gather to discuss diseases and medical conditions. Now, with Medify on board and a community of people whose discussions about health are also a great source of data, Alliance Health is seeing how mining unstructured data from professionals and patients alike can help improve heath.

Medify had used the National Library of Medicine to build out ontologies that it uses to “teach” the algorithms to understand medical terminology and treatment plans, and has then built up a user interface around those algorithms. Like IBM has found with Watson, its supercomputer that has found a role helping doctors diagnose illnesses based on symptoms, medicine is a good place for this type of data mining.

The goal is to take the ontologies learned from Medify and combine its algorithms with what people discuss in Alliance Health’s communities. Then, Alliance can apply new algorithms to see who in the community is offering the best advice, understand how patients influence and inspire each other, and then help pharmaceutical companies and even doctors understand and influence how patients make medical decisions.

Getting value from big data doesn’t have to be a big undertaking.

It’s actually a great example of how thinking about big data doesn’t have to be as complicated as using a supercomputer and expensive clinical research filter through algorithms to help doctors diagnose illnesses. Streat says the company’s data is only in the low-terabyte range and they process it using Amazon Web Services, including EC2 and Elastic MapReduce. They add new data every day and refresh their machine learning algorithms weekly, if not every few days.

There’s a place for these simpler solutions, and by bringing together a community and providing it with information, Alliance Health might become a company much like Spiceworks is in the IT space — able to both monetize and help a community of niche users in a way that benefits everyone. For example, a company that makes a new diabetes test might pay to sponsor the diabetes channel on Alliance or may even pay to find out who the big influencers are in the forums associated with that channel. If done correctly, users might even welcome sponsored how-tos or better information delivered about a new drug or device.

Streat explained that as far as medicine and data-combining go, there are many efforts around devices and even fancier data sets. However, he’s confident that even with something like expensive clinical data that’s locked behind paywalls, just being able to direct people to better answers and give them a sense of community is a good place to start.

Investors seem to think it’s a decent bet as well. Alliance Health has raised $20 million since it’s founding in 2006 from investors such as New World Ventures, Physic Ventures, Epic Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures.

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Etzioni, who spends his days as a computer science professor at the University of Washington, is probably best known as the co-founder of Farecast. That company, which Microsoft bought for $115 million in 2008 and incorporated into Bing, helped even the playing field between travelers and airlines by predicting the best times for travelers to purchase their tickets. Airlines practice yield management by regularly changing their prices to maximize profit, but Etzioni was able to find a fair amount of predictability once Farecast was able to get the data it needed from the airline industry.

Lately, though, Etzioni has been focused on his latest startup, Decide.com, which launched in 2010 and applies the premise behind Farecast to consumer electronics and appliances. At some point, Etzioni told me, the practice of yield management had migrated to “pretty much every non-trivial good.” Consumer electronics was the natural place to start, he said, because they tend to be highly considered purchases and enough of them are made online to generate lots of data and justify the existence of a web application.

I explained Decide’s methodology in some detail recently, but the gist is that it analyze thousands of data sources — from pricing history to model history to rumors of new models — to tell consumers whether to buy or wait on their electronics purchases. It’s similar to some degree with Retrevo (see disclosure), but Decide focuses more on predicting price than on telling consumers what’s a good value now.

There’s a notable difference between predicting airlines prices and predicting consumer-goods prices, though — while Farecast had to fight to get airlines to release their data, there’s an overload of it on the web. Between news sites, blogs, product profiles and price-comparison sites, Decide has all the data it needs. “The hardest is still separating the wheat from the chaff,” Etzioni said.

Decide’s prediction models have become so accurate, though — about 77 percent — that the company recently decided to put its money where it’s mouth is. Its new Got Your Back program provides members with a number of deals each day, and if a member buys and the price drops, Decide will make up the difference.

Aside from expanding price prediction into other areas with highly volatile prices, such as hotel rooms, Etzioni appears to have his eyes set on the mobile world. There is, of course, location data, which is the holy grail of mobile analytics. Etzioni thinks it will be about three years before location-based analytics really reaches its stride in terms of usage, but it’s coming. Being able to get signals as to where app users are at any given time is a powerful proposition in terms of personalization, and already there are stealth-mode startups such as Placed trying to solve the problem for developers.

Etzioni also thinks there’s work to be done in condensing big data to fit onto small screens. Companies trying to improve the consumer experience will keep incorporating new analytic techniques, such as sentiment analysis, into their products, but the output of those efforts has to go somewhere. Producing and analyzing big data is one thing, he said, but you need to summarize it in a manner that people can consume on their mobile devices.

Disclosure: Retrevo is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog.

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Get 25% off automatically when you purchase VMware Fusion online, using the coupon code “FusionRocks” for a limited time only.

VMware Fusion has been my recommendation for some time because of the wide support for guest OS’s including OS X Server, but the new Parallels Desktop 4.0 release does a lot to close the gap. I imagine the coupon is motivated in part by the increased competition from Parallels 4.0 this month.

Our own Darrell Etherington wrote up a comparison of VMware Fusion 2.0 and Parallels 4.0 where he slightly preferred Fusion. Now it is even a better deal at 25% off.

The coupon expires at midnight (Pacific time) at Sunday, November 30.

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I set out to compare fare-finding services and booking engines, including Kayak, SideStep, Mobissimo, Farecast, Priceline, Expedia and Hotwire. To do so, I chose three itineraries: a business trip to San Francisco, a trip from the U.S. to South America, and a one-way trip from India to the UK.

The winner? Mobissimo.

Itinerary 1: Business Trip from Denver to San Francisco

When I travel on business, the dates are usually inflexible, because I’m likely attending a conference or other scheduled meeting. I choose nonstop because business travel is hassle enough without lengthening the amount of time it takes to get there and back. But even though my primary concern is convenience, I’ll still have to justify my choice to whomever is footing my business bill. So cost matters.

I started with Kayak, which offered me a fare of $231 with one stop. But I wanted to go nonstop, and for that, it provided a fare of $333. I then used its “compare fares” feature to check on Expedia, Priceline and Hotwire. Nonstop fares on those sites were about the same as Kayak: right around $330.

Hotwire offered a “limited rate” fare of $219, but I wasn’t able to find out the carrier, the times, or whether or not I’d have to make stops — hardly ideal for the business traveler.

SideStep looked like it might have a winner for me, telling me that United had a nonstop flight available for $242. Clicking through, however, revealed that United’s nonstop fare was actually $333.

But then I checked with Mobissimo and Farecast, both of which found a nonstop flight with Frontier for $210! Wow! About a third less — Om would be pleased with my frugality.

The next time I make business travel plans, I’ll be sure to check those sites first — and maybe even go directly to the Frontier site myself. As useful as fare finders are, they’re even more useful if you combine them with some personal knowledge of which airlines most economically serve your favorite routes.

Winners: Mobissimo and Farecast.

Itinerary 2: Trip Home to Paraguay

My Paraguayan au pair is traveling home in February to visit her family before staying in the U.S. for an additional year. As a bonus for her hard work, we’ve offered to pay for her ticket, but obviously we’d like to keep the price low.

The dates for this trip are flexible, but the departure and arrival airports are not. I chose Feb. 15th-29th as the travel days, but with the hope that I could specify “flexible dates” and be offered cheaper days to travel.

Since Mobissimo and Farecast were so helpful with my business trip, I started with them. Mobissimo turned in a pretty good choice, of $1,155.69, and Farecast offered a fare of $1,303. Neither, however, gave me the option of classifying my dates as “flexible.”

Kayak and Priceline each found a fare of $1,140 with Brazil’s largest airline, TAM, while Expedia offered a TAM fare of $1,334. Hotwire doesn’t cover that itinerary.

I wanted to use flexible dates to see if I could find an even cheaper flight, but Expedia’s flexible dates checkbox only works with popular U.S. routes and anyway, it didn’t find the best fare for me in the first place. Kayak doesn’t offer a flexible dates capability. Kayak offers a flexible dates feature, but you need to sign up for a free account to access it.

Priceline made it easy to select alternate departure and return dates, though, so I ran the itinerary through again, shifting up by one day then shifting back by one day. I got the same result: $1,140 flying either United or US Air along with TAM to South America.

Winners: Priceline and Kayak. Close runner-up: Mobissimo.

Itinerary 3: One way from Bangalore to London.

For my third itinerary, I had to use my imagination. So I imagined someone beginning a new life in a different country, moving from India to the UK. Since Mobissimo did well for me with both my first two itineraries, I started with them, using a travel date of March 1st, 2008. It gave me a price of $457 through ebookers.com.

Priceline requires U.S. departure airports, so that was out. Hotwire doesn’t handle one-way tickets and only covers travel in the U.S. and Canada.

Kayak, SideStep, Farecast and Expedia all turned up fares around $460, with Farecast offering up the lowest option, at $455. But then I noticed that I could easily compare fares on Orbitz, Travelation and Cheap Tickets from the SideStep window.

It looked like I’d made a smart move. Using it, I discovered that Orbitz and Cheap Tickets each had available fares of $392, and Travelation had a $385 ticket for a flight on Gulf Air with just one stop! But when I looked closer I noticed that once you added on taxes, the price came up to $462 — almost exactly what I’d found before. It was a good reminder to always compare fares with taxes and additional charges added on.

Winners: Everyone except Priceline and Hotwire.

Overall winner: Mobissimo. It came within a few dollars of the low fare on every itinerary. If I were actually shopping for trips, though, I’d probably run the itinerary through all the sites, to make sure I didn’t miss any great fares.

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