Announcing the release of the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket Service Update 2!

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Announcing the release of the DataMarket Service Update 2 ! With this release, we’re rolling out a little something for everyone. First up: check out our shiny new Service Explorer:

 

The offering query UI has evolved into more of an all-purpose toolbox. Now you can create data visualizations right there in your browser. And if you want to do more with the data – but don’t feel like whipping up some code – now you can download your query results in XLS, CSV and XML formats (you already know about our DataMarket Add-In for Excel , don’t you? The CTP2 of the Add-In, shipped today, will no longer require Account key and you can simply use your Windows Live ID credentials).

 

Have you found yourself exploring the marketplace and found an offering you wanted to share – maybe some historic weather observations from WeatherBug (is it really normal to have this much rain in Seattle?), or nutrition information from Gregg London Consulting (hmm, better not have the second helping of dessert after all)? Now you can tell all of your friends about it with our new Facebook Like Button.

For all you developers out there, we’ve made it easier for you to bring valuable data into your apps by enabling Free Trials! This functionality allows you to subscribe to offerings for free, if the content publisher has chosen to publish a trial, so you can wrap your brain around the data and the best way to pop it into your app. Dun & Bradstreet, Boundary Solutions, MetricMash and StrikeIron helped us launch this new feature by creating a bunch of free trials – be sure to check out their free stuff.

Did you want to your application to access the dataset on behalf of the user? Now you can with OAuth v2 integration in SU2! Surely enough, the user has to actually approve the usage as part of the consent flow (enjoy the snapshot below).

 

 Hello everyone outside the United States! We haven’t forgotten about you. With this release we’re introducing the first phase of our international expansion. If you’re in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, now you can subscribe to commercial DataMarket offerings – paying for them in your local currency! Thank you MetricMash and StrikeIron for helping us launch this important expansion by making your offerings available to people outside the US.
PS – If you’re not in one of the countries listed above, fear not, we still haven’t forgotten about you…

And last, but certainly not least, we’re also releasing offerings from three new content publishers: Digital Trowel, InfoChimps and MetricMash. Welcome to the DataMarket, guys! And, best of all… all three have published some sort of free service so you can get started with their stuff at no cost!

  • Powerlinx Database of US based companies and professionalsfrom Digital Trowel: Powerlinx contains contact information of more than 10 million USA companies with website addresses, 25M detailed company profiles, 25M executives including 5 million in-depth profiles with email addresses and phone numbers.
  • Trstrankfrom Infochimps: The Infochimps Trstrank measures how important a Twitter user is. It’s a sophisticated network measure of centrality, not just a count of the number of followers a user has.
  • U.S. Unemployment Data - 1948 to Current from MetricMash: This dataset is based on the Current Population Survey (CPS) published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and is updated monthly. The data is broken down into these unemployment categories: rate; length, population and labor force participation.

The DataMarket Team