Our data maven Ted Stavropoulos alerted me to Microsoft’s new ‘codename Dallas‘ initiative. And no, it’s not an attempt to bring back JR, Sue Ellen and all the other cheeseballs from Southfork ranch. It’s something even better than that – an appstore for data.
Dallas is a site for subscribing to and reporting from various publicly available data sets. In other words it’s an app store for data or a ‘catalog’ as those old-world marketeers at Microsoft so quaintly call it. Hey guys! My grandad got his data from a catalog. They used to come through the mail printed on something called paper. Today we are in the age of ‘datastreams’ available from something called the ‘Internet’ – shame that nobody seems to have told Microsoft (or those pesky junk mail houses for that matter – just how many catalogs can Lands End send to one address?)
Anyway, I digress. The point is that lots of datasets are available from a single place, and presumably through some API built into Visual Studio, so we can expect that a few people might figure out how monetize some value from all this data by mashing it up for analysis in some way or another. This could be especially valuable for holistic reporting – let’s say when all the SEC filing data is included in the ‘catalog’ – because then you’ll be able to mash financial data with non-financial data from a variety of sources.
I can just see all the old Smash aliens (it’s a UK thing – watch the YTV) getting a real chuckle out of that.
UPDATE: 26 July 2010
Dallas is now part of Microsoft Pinpoint (a trademark). I find this all rather amusing as I used to operate a US corporation called Pinpoint Inc. Pinpoint Inc. was a supplier of data and information about ERP software – primarily in the form of a subscription newsletter called ‘cfoinfo’. Ironically I thought about trademarking the term ‘pinpoint’ with reference to data and information services. In the end I thought nah! you couldn’t trademark something as obvious as that. But I was wrong. That’s probably why I’m a blogger and Microsoft is a multi billion $ corporation.
