There is an interesting and brand new project from The MathWorks: Trendy.

Matlab Trendy is new and interesting

There are many free data sources available on the web. But, often these data sources do not contain their history and it is hard to spots trends. This is where the new online tool Trendy from The MathWorks comes into play.

Try Trendy: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/trendy/plots

The community creates data readers and the Trendy servers fetch the data every day. Now, you can create plots and identify trends similar to Google Trends (http://trends.google.com/websites, http://www.google.com/insights/search/), but with all kinds of data.

High potential

Currently, there is not much data available. But, I think that this is a great project which deserves contributions.

Imagine what would be possible if we can discover links between all kinds of data sources. Here are a few free data sources which are not so widely known:

• http://www.indexmundi.com/ World-wide econometric data
• http://www.bundesbank.de/statistik/statistik.php German money and interest-rate statistics
• http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/ US money and interest-rate statistics
• http://www.data.gov/ Public data of all US government organizations

For free market data sources see my previous post.

Conclusion

I think that this project can become a great tool. The start is promising – I am curious, where this leads to. However, there is a downer: You have to have a vaild Matlab license for creating new plots. By the way, a free alternative with a similar goal is http://scraperwiki.com. It is worth watching both approaches…