What about mass networking data? Terbine taught you to sell it.

Terbine recently raised the seed fund, but that does not prevent its founder and CEO David Knight from making long-term plans for the company's future. From billboards to drones, from ships to satellites, Knight is concerned about a wide variety of areas and finds that they can contribute to their huge database. For example, he plans to invest in large sums of money to monitor traffic conditions within a thousands of-metre radius of the busiest market, or to make it possible to shut down a certain route before it is exposed to oil spills.

Terbine wants to be an intermediary platform for trading on the data market, manipulating data collection, storage, and format selection across the enterprise. Knight envisages a trading market where some data may be free, but most of the data needs to be charged to price the data based on the timeliness, scarcity and relevance of the data in any given time. Knight's early focus was on energy, agriculture, oil and natural gas.

"I find that a lot of people are talking about the internet," Knight said, "but so far, most of the discussions have reminded me of the early CB radio." "At that time, the radio was like the current sensor, there was, but not connected to the most interested people, the role is not small."

The idea may be achievable-even Cisco has thrown out the notion of a "data broker". IBM has also suggested that it can profit from mobile data, but so far no companies have launched similar services. In addition to the myriad regulatory hurdles that need to be overcome, the technical challenges of building infrastructure facilities are also troubling. Terbine has created a prototype of the data interchange platform in Amazon's Network Service system and is now delving into its edge network structure, but it is another matter whether it can be built.

Whether terbine or other companies can build such a platform is a problem that requires other overseas companies to share data. Early government agencies have made a lot of effort to fill data, but so far these data are not worth much, and some are not even available because of formatting problems.

Knight that companies are willing to spend money on valuable data, and he agrees that early use of resource Exchange (by providing data for data) may allow more companies to participate and realize their value in the transaction. Terbine also wants to be able to deploy their own sensor networks with strategic partners to ensure that the data they deem valuable can be exploited, he said.

Knight that the Terbine's headquarters in Las Vegas would have a strategic advantage because of the highly interconnected Supernap data center (which he hopes will eventually be able to host the Terbine platform) and the DOE Remote Sensing laboratory. He hoped that the Department of Energy Remote Sensing laboratory could provide a test bed for some of Terbine's experiments and, if possible, provide some talent support.

To be sure, this is a risky bet. But Knight had been involved in the exploration of the Space Shuttle endeavour to the California Center for Science, and had worked on a spacecraft that had been interacting with the High-tech virtual reality, and he was comfortable with the game's mentality.

"What I really like is to do things that people don't realize," he said.