We’re in New York today giving the folks attending MoneyTech 2008 a little sneak preview of a feature called WikiData that we’ll be launching in a month or two. Although we’re not quite ready to unveil it because we’re still putting on the finishing touches, here’s the basic idea. We’ve been hard at work building a wiki-like platform for financial data. This isn’t the same old financial data you find on a lot of other investing sites (stuff like income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements). This platform will help capture metrics that measure and compare companies in an industry. This kind of data is usually publicly available in a variety SEC filings and company annual reports, but it takes a huge amount of effort to comb through it all. So we’re building a repository of this data to collect it all in one place. Each data point will also have the source reference.

In case you’ve never heard of Money:Tech, it is a conference organized by Paul Kedrosky and the folks at O’Reilly (the producers of Web 2.0 and ETech) focused on exploring what happens at the intersection of Web 2.0 and Wall Street. It was pretty fun sharing the same stage with folks like Jim Cramer and Paul Kedrosky!