Good to meet you – I’m a fan of Datamob.

The reason I suggested having Datamob be a middle man was because while companies like Amazon do have a ton of excess computing and storage resources, I still see the need for a centralized catalog and repository for large data sets and API’s. Whether or not you host the data or API yourself is another issue. Ideally Datamob would be the one place everyone knows they could look for these kinds of data sets, either for a download or to submit something interesting. Then datacenters with large amounts of compute and storage resources (ie utility compute centers) could mirror that data, and then people could mirror off of them. Same way we distribute linux distributions / isos / etc.

It’s largely an cloud economics thing, but I think having a great CC licensed group like Datamob for the marketing aspect would work really well.

I’m intrigued by your suggestion that Datamob should store and catalog large datasets, but I’m not sure I understand why hosting companies like amazon and its competitors would need us as a middleman. Shouldn’t they be doing just that with their rows of servers and excess computing power?