Dealipedia is launching today, aiming to apply wikinomics to the collection and mashing up of information about corporate deals, including financing, IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, and even bankruptcies.
So many times there are announcements of interesting deals that are shrouded behind a ‘details were kept private’ veil. What Dealipedia is betting on, is that there will be a large set of parties, who will be interested in filling the blanks, and let everybody understand the details. Investors, bankers, principals, PR people will all potentially use Dealipedia as a repository and a source of information. Think ValleyWag, but less animosity, ill feelings, and more collaborative and quantitative meat to the daily gossip!
Dealipedia is a creation of Michael Robertson who is at it again, this time disrupting the closeted world of technology dealmaking, bringing into the open its details, the ‘cui prodest’, ‘whose benefit’, that is actually an essential piece of information the market should not be left without. (Robertson is a libertarian. I am sure that if he could he’d also make sure insider trading would be made legal, for example: at the end it is one of the most efficient methods for the market to learn about what insiders think!)
It is also very good to see that Dealipedia is licensing all its contributed content under a very liberal Creative Commons Attribution license. What does that mean? That the data contributed to it is not sitting in a one way silo, closed away from creative uses, but that anybody can take it for mashups, the creation of visualizations, derivative second-order knowledge, and even make money off it if she wants to!
…and with proper participation in it, if you want to know how much Michael and others made from the sale of MP3.com, now you can!
I also wrote about Dealipedia briefly on the Metasocial blog.