On Mar 29, 2006, at 11:50 AM, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> There's much in the reservation industry that is basically a computer
> implementation of a 3x5 note card system. And none of those systems
> were originally built to talk to each other, so it's often impossible
We at one time built a nice pre-dot-com-bubble-pop fortune on taking
the logical equivalent of 3x5 card info from the US government and
making it web searchable. Sometimes we had to pay lots of $$$ to buy
the data from various contractors, but there was no copyright on it
so we could resell and/or give it away. It was a brilliant business
model for its day. Now most of the data is online by the gov't
itself....
It just takes some push by some enterprising individuals to move the
world into better data access.