By Ted O’Brien
I was able to speak with CEO, Derek Steer last week about Mode, a company that calls itself the “Github for Data Analysis” and will be an online repository for data science work.
It will serve two main purposes:
1) It will promote sharing of models and code to save Data Scientists and Data Analysts from “reinventing the wheel” every time they do something new.
2) It will be a popular place to show off your data science work to potential hiring managers, which is often critical to landing that first great gig for new, post graduates of Master and PhD programs.
Fresh off their announcement of $550,000 seed round funding led by Yammer founder David Sacks, Mode CEO Derek Steer (also previously of Yammer) and his team will be launching a beta version of the site in November and opening the site to the general public in Q1. (Sign up for beta)
In the same way GitHub provides developers a way to store work online publically for free, Mode will charge users to keep their data work private.
In short, if you work in data science, Mode will offer a host of models and other work that you can apply to your own data sets. Mode is betting that data science as a market niche is growing now, and will continue to do so for years. (We naturally agree!)
As we all know, sharing baseline models and code can benefit all the players doing data science and unlock valuable time to make the data “talk”. Having a focus on data science and analytics (we predict) should attract a critical mass looking to save time and get exposure. It looks like the right company at the right time.
In speaking with Mode’s Steer, he indicated that integration with AWS, a service that the company itself uses, is something that will be added in the future.
For those wishing to take part in the beta test of the site please go to www.modeanalytics.com and enter you email address. Steer was pretty confident that most who sign up will be selected to participate along with many high profile players in the data science space.