[cridal]

1) Do you think this should be specific to a particular business process (like managing sales force performance, managing inventory, etc.) or open ended enough to just consume data in whatever form and let the user mold the application to their liking? I guess the short version of this question is: Will they know what they want?

2) You mention admin web interface to the app. Do you think this interface has a chance of being used by a non-IT people? Will business users have conceptual appreciation for data quality issues (great majority of problems with data analysis) like deduplication, incompleteness, errors, etc. Will creating clean data repositories (and therefore QA) be the core of this service or should the user be in charge at every point, allowing him/her to even get the "garbage in" and, what follows, "garbage out"?

3) Would the ability to create private data mashups with data provided by the service provider, other publishers, or publicly available be something of core importance or nice to have?

I have a lot of other questions, since I've started working on a web solution to this problem that would work in a way that is quite similar to what you've described. I would be great if you could share your responses/other thoughts further, either here or privately on my email (in the profile). Thx!