Duedil to add '100 times more data' in site rebuild

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Duedil, an online tool that allows anyone to access company data for free, is promising it will be making a huge amount of data available "over the coming months".

An email was sent to users today to explain why the platform – a useful tool for journalists interested in financial and company data – has been quiet during the past six months.

The London-based company has been "completely rebuilding our site" to offer more data and ways of organising and accessing data, the email states.

"We've spent the last six months working on infrastructure," Duedil's CEO Damian Kimmelman told Journalism.co.uk. "We have about 100 times the amount of data that we are currently showing.

"We realised from early on that we have a massive problem, and that is how do you deal with all this data?"

The platform has therefore been working out to do this.

Much of what will be rolled out over the coming weeks and months has significant potential for journalists.

Data that has so far been beyond reach using Duedil includes HMRC customs data, which allows users to see what companies are importing.

"We have access to every single financial of every single company in Europe," Kimmelman said, explaining that includes location-based data around the franchises of companies.

"We have access to payment data, to CCJ [county court judgments] information, to credit scores, to industry-specific information, all the way down to things like energy consumption of FTSE 100 companies.

"The whole point is this data needs to be brought together," Kimmelman added. "When you bring it together you can start to understand really exciting trends and things that are happening within the economy."

Another example of data that is likely to be of interest to journalists is the ability to see how the directors of companies are connected to one another.

"If you want to look up all the relationships between directors and then want to see shareholder information, what percentage of the business they own and equate that to some sort of financial amount, and then see that over time and then see all the news relating to them, those queries get bigger and bigger and bigger."

"We currently have a crawler that crawls 50,000 news organisations a day with 1.5 million articles, yet if we want to do anything really fun with it we've realised that we really have to deal with the infrastructure."

Duedil has therefore been working behind-the-scenes on this and Kimmelman said the new data will not be added until "this fundamental fabric" of the site is in place.

Before the data roll out starts, Duedil is releasing a new "lists" feature, which aggregates information in one place.

Duedil will be adding new features on a weekly basis, the first of which includes "cross-page ajax loading" that gives a fast, smoother, iPad-like browsing experience, which has just been released along with two widgets: an account estimator, which allows you "to estimate the accounts of an organisation that files abbreviated accounts", and a ratios widget.

Kimmelman said he has been keen to release new features and data for the past six months, saying he found it "seriously annoying to put on hold ambitions".

"This is just the beginning," he promised. "We are finally doing things that are cool again."

• Damian Kimmelman will be speaking about Duedil at ournews:rewired – full stream ahead conference on 13 July. For information and tickets click here.