Ask HN: Is this data startup idea viable?

Sometimes I want to play around with some data but don't want to overcome the barrier of downloading it, cleaning it, and writing parsing code.

Our vision is to build a startup that makes it easier to do just that. We store the data, you use a webapp to play around with it. So, in a matter of a minute, you could load a time series of Google's stock price, one of Apple's stock price, normalize each by the value of the Dow, and plot on top of them a time series of the consumer price index for urban consumers. Or you could generate some quick scatter plots to see if there's a correlation.

The UI model is based on dataflow programming (like Orange, Weka, or Rapidminer). If you don't know what that is, it looks like this:

http://mines.humanoriented.com/classes/2010/fall/csci568/portfolio_exports/sphilip/images/sample_workflow_border.png

You create "widgets" that do something, like loading data, or making a scatter plot, and you link them up to do things with them.

There's a splash page up at www.kemvi.com.

There's also a working prototype. If you're interested in testing it out, please email info@kemvi.com.