Government, private firm partner to distribute trade data to corporate users

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By Linda Rosencrance

(IDG) -- A new government-to-business service called Syndication will allow corporate users to get the latest official statistics on U.S. foreign trade delivered to their Web sites or Intranets.

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Stat-USA, an electronic information agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has partnered with FinancialContent Inc., an online provider of financial data and market tools, to deliver data from numerous government agencies to FinancialContent's customers.

The data, which includes official U.S. import and export statistics on more than 18,000 commodities traded worldwide, is used by analysts, journalists, traders and others to gauge the flow of goods across a wide range of industries, said Wing Yu, CEO of FinancialContent. Yu said his company is in the process of integrating the data from Stat-USA into its software platform and will begin delivering it to clients in January.

Stat-USA spokesman Forrest Williams said Millbrae, Calif.-based FinancialContent is the first company to buy a Syndication contract for the USATradeOnline database. He said the $6,000 annual contract allows Financial Content to push the trade information, as well as other government data, to several hundred of its customers. FinancialContent can add customers and pay Stat-USA on a per-user basis, Williams said. Stat-USA, which gets no taxpayer funding, depends in part on these types of partnerships to sustain itself, Williams said.

Williams said FinancialContent is paying for a service, not for the actual content. Although the information is in the public domain and available to users for a small fee from Stat-USA's Web site, Financial Content pays Stat-USA to pump the information, which is updated on a monthly basis, to the company.

"We plan to work closely with Stat-USA to identify and deploy to both small businesses and Fortune 500 companies that rely on trade data," said Yu.