Cha-ching

As I write this column, US politicians are passionately debating the dismal state of our economy. Maybe they should be busily coding to help balance the budget? This month, I offer you a roundup of a few potential new revenue streams.

In July, XBRL US announced the XBRL Challenge [1], and the winning developer, team, or company will take home the US$ 20,000 grand prize. XBRL US is a nonprofit consortium for the extensible business reporting language standards in the US market. The announcement says, "XBRLis expected to help usher in a new generation of tools that can be used by investors, analysts, businesses, regulators, watchdogs, economists, and academics to gain insight that is currently out of reach or prohibitively expensive to acquire." Prizes will be awarded February 2012 for the "most inventive and useful application leveraging XBRL-formatted data from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) EDGAR database" submitted by January 31, 2012.