Data.gov

        On my 25 hour drive back from the desert to Kansas City, I listened to Tina Seelig, Executive Director, Stanford Technology Ventures Program, introduce several speakers in the STVP 10 week long speaker series. One speaker caught my attention.

His name is Aneesh Chopra, the nations first Chief Technology Officer. He reports directly to the president.  He spoke for more than two hours on a site - data.gov. He said his mission was to encourage entrepreneurs and innovators to go to the site and use the data to launch new businesses. 

        I explored the site this morning. It is powerful and revealing. The site includes raw data that each federal department collects. It includes data from which toy causes the most problems for infants to which hospital has the best health performance. The data sets on hospitals include data on bad debts for both inpatient and outpatient services by hospital. I can not review all the numerous data sets at this site. The government has data on many things.

Chopra listed several new businesses that had been started, using the data at data.gov, including several that had mobile apps. It was impressive.

I encourage you to take a look at data.gov and keep an open mind.