Windows Azure Datamarket and the business of selling data

I've lately been involved in a research project where display and publication of data is one of the topics. Part of Microsoft's Azure cloud solution is the Windows Azure Marketplace (WAM), which is a site where you can purchase not only Azure-hosted applications, but also public data.

Selling data in computer-consumable format is not new, but there's more and more interested in this kind of marketplaces, as I've also learned through the research project I'm involved with.

What's interesting in the Windows Azure Datamarket is that as a developer, you can publish your data using industry standard web interfaces, including OData which works for example directly with Excel, for instance. Then, the marketplace platform can take care of the billing, and you as the developer can concentrate on data quality.

If you are interested, C# code samples can be found on MSDN.

There's also available a Developer's Playground, which I can suggest trying out if you are interested in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

Happy hacking!