Faster than a Speeding Bullet

This industry moves so fast. I often take a day out to dive into genuine Alpha sites and see what people are doing outside my areas of interest. There are some genuinely useful, if not incredibly niche, sites out there.




First up is Swivel, a site for exchanging and exploring data - sounds dull, but for anyone involved in business there's no escaping the need for hard facts.

It is essentially a highly focussed search engine, so instead of hoping Google will pluck out the right chart for that presentation to the board, Swivel gets you straight to it.

Did you know:

The World's Highest Paid Athletes

How Old are MySpace Users (only 88 data points, against +100m users so not so accurate!)

Virtual Gold appreciates faster than Real Gold

Media Spend by US Consumers

Music Sales: From Vinyl to Ipod

Battle of the Search Engines


For each dataset, users get stuck in to flipping the charts in different ways and mashing-up with other info. If this was integrated into Zoho Sheet or Google Spreadsheet, you average user might start uploading data-sets from their harddrives. In time, this could disrupt an entire industry of analysts and researchers through the wisdom of crowds.

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UPDATE: 30th March 2007

I've just had a note from Chris Grisanti of Swivel.com that Google Spreadsheets are now integrated into their site, plus a bunch of improved UI improvements, particularly on the homepage. Now spreadsheets and data are hardly as exciting as data, but I wouldn't mind betting that this will become a pretty huge business before anyone really notices.

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