SAN FRANCISCO — David Soloff is recruiting an army of “hyperdata” collectors.

The company he co-founded, Premise, created a smartphone application that is now used by 700 people in 25 developing countries. Using guidance from Mr. Soloff and his co-workers, these people, mostly college students and homemakers, photograph food and goods in public markets.

By analyzing the photos of prices and the placement of everyday items like piles of tomatoes and bottles of shampoo and matching that to other data, Premise is building a real-time inflation index to sell to companies and Wall Street traders, who are hungry for insightful data.

“Within five years, I’d like to have 3,000 or 4,000 people doing this,” said Mr. Soloff, who is also Premise’s chief executive. “It’s a useful global inflation monitor, a way of looking at food security, or a way a manufacturer can judge what kind of shelf space he is getting.”

Collecting data from all sorts of odd places and analyzing it much faster than was possible even a couple of years ago has become one of the hottest areas of the technology industry. The idea is simple: With all that processing power and a little creativity, researchers should be able to find novel patterns and relationships among different kinds of information.