What are all of the companies in San Francisco trying to make the Internet of Things happen? Google it if you like, but you're only like to get a simple list of companies, no doubt in an SEO-friendly order.

What if you could see those companies in a more comprehensive way? Better yet, what if you could filter and sort by Alexa Rank, headcount, company status (re: public vs. private), total revenue and other forms of structured data? And what if you could see how close those companies' offerings compete with each other in a very visual and interactive way?

Foxy data

That's the premise behind DataFox, a company that harnesses troves of unstructured data so you don't have to. Here's a screen shot of an actual dataviz that DataFox creates when I punched in a few search criteria:

For instance, you can see that FitBit relates to its ostensible competition by the DataFox Score, evidently the company's proprietary way of ranking companies.

I played around with DataFox for a bit and was truly amazed. The software scrapes both structured and unstructured data from myriad sources and presents them in a very simple, user-friendly interface. I certainly could have used DataFox when researching my books. Think of it as one-stop shopping for industry research. The company sports more than 400,000 company profiles with more being added all of the time.

Take that, LinkedIn!

DataFox is just one of untold companies helping everyday folks make sense out of big data. I meet skeptics and dataphobes on a weekly basis, but I'm sensing that slowly more traditional business folks are starting to get it. I'd argue that the DataFoxes of the world serve an invaluable purpose: they make big data more tangible, more real.

Simon says: more examples mean greater adoption

Speaking abstractly about the power of petabytes of largely unstructured data often falls on deaf ears. I get the strongest reactions from my audiences while speaking when I talk about practice as opposed to theory. For many CXOs, what's possible in five years often doesn't resonate as much as what organizations are doing right now. That goes double when with visual tools that require zero installation time and anyone can try out in minutes.

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What say you?