Today Google announced an interesting new product: Google Squared. Here are some links:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/13/google_squared/
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132972
Basically it will return data from search results in spreadsheet format. And of course, when you’ve got data in Google spreadsheet format you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it, like stick Panorama’s pivot table gadget on top of it.
This, plus moves towards support of RDFa also announced today:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/google-takes-steps-towards-a-more-structured-web/
means that there’s going to be some really interesting possibilities for doing BI direct from data sourced from the web.
Oh, and let’s not forget about Wolfram Alpha, also coming soon and equally exciting from a web/data/BI point of view. Imagine, instead of it being able to tell you things like the distance between the Earth and the Moon right now, having your business modelled in it and then letting end users query this model using a search-engine interface.
