Byproducts
When an oil company is drilling for crude oil, it produces some gas as a byproduct, and when a Gas company is drilling for gas, they produce condensate, which is a liquid that can be easily refined into gas oil and other petroleum products, much like crude oil.
Oil companies tend to burn the problematic gas and keep any useful gas for sale later on to make extra profit.
The same thing goes for gas companies; they sell the condensate to some modular or big refinery that processes condensate for extra profit.
When a company mines for precious metals in Africa, it captures a lot of data that is just there, piled up doing nothing and sometimes viewed as a liability.
The opportunity cost of not monetizing proprietary data and just sitting on it is what keeps me up at night.
An old saying goes, "one man's trash is another man's treasure"; it's never been truer for me.
This data can be preprocessed to strip personal identifiers, if any, remove all noisy, unnecessary fluff, and keep high-quality information that can be used to train some model at some lab somewhere for some price tag (totally compliant legal transactions back and forth).
The Cost / Benefit Analysis
Imagine you wake up and open your laptop and browse through tens of subfolders named by year and month, trying to find a specific spreadsheet that contains the operating expenditures and revenue for the year 2017 of your family's agriculture business in Ivory Coast.
Ten full years of real-world data on real-world farms that create real-world value.
Ivory Coast produces ~45% of the world's cocoa; that means if you're eating any edible food that contains any cocoa, there's a ~45% chance it came from there.
If this data were to be processed, cleaned, audited for compliance, and sold, it would have netted around ~$15k, and this is just 10 years of OPEX and revenue data, not the crops, problems, and solutions that kept the business going and thriving in a continent that shows no mercy to free enterprise.
The comprehensive operational data is worth multiples of that of standard financial data.
But the question is: why not?
Why not contribute your data for the great and good of everybody?
Why not value and benefit from the valuable data you are sitting on?
ANT
Ants are useless on the individual level but the collective can create complex adaptive systems
Our goal with antplatform.ai is to mine data in Africa and make sure the AI labs acknowledge our complex and slowly adapting system.