Socrata Releases First Social Data Player Platform

SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - June 29, 2009) - Socrata, Inc. -- Making Data Social™ -- today announced the commercial availability of its Social Data Player™ Platform. Government CIOs, Web content managers, and new media directors can now enhance citizens' ability to discover data directly within agency Web sites with the Social Data Player, fulfilling open government data and civic participation mandates, while significantly lowering the cost of delivering data online.

The federal government's newest public data site -- Data.gov -- is expected to provide more than 240,000 government datasets within the next month, which is just the tip of the iceberg considering the millions of both government and private sector datasets that have yet to be unlocked. Yet, even today's government Web sites that are posting datasets typically only contain links to large files usually stored in formats like .CSV, which must be downloaded and accessed with desktop software. Offline data viewing is out of the reach of citizens without a technical background or proprietary software, greatly hampering the ability to share new findings with others online.

Enabling governments to deliver on transparency and civic engagement promises, Socrata's Social Data Player allows citizens to sort, filter and search datasets directly within a Web site, comment on and discuss data, and easily propagate datasets and discoveries across social networks, like Twitter or Facebook. The Social Data Player Platform provides easy access to data similar to how media players are used for audio and video content. Furthermore, the Social Data Player Platform includes the Socrata Application Programming Interface (API), making datasets instantly available in machine-readable formats.

"Public data is the lifeblood of a democracy and the Social Data Player is focused on ensuring that the playing field is leveled and ALL of the public has access to critical government information," said Kevin Merritt, CEO and founder of Socrata, Inc. "Citizens are no longer content to access data as static downloadable links in legacy file formats. At the same time, governments are focused on fulfilling their obligation to American citizens while lowering costs of data delivery and storage. The Social Data Player provides open standards for both citizens and governments to have their lofty goals and expectations met."

The Socrata Social Data Player is available in two customer offerings:

--  Basic:  Socrata's free entry-level offering allows anyone to host data
    on Socrata.com. This offering is for organizations that have a small number
    of datasets.
    
--  Platform: The Socrata Social Data Player Platform (SDPP) allows
    organizations to make data available to the masses by transforming the way
    audiences consume and share public datasets, enabling government agencies
    to boost citizen participation and fulfill transparency mandates.   The
    SDPP includes capabilities for easy dataset uploading by content managers,
    the Socrata Application Programming Interface (API) for providing developer
    access to datasets in a machine-readable format, and Socrata's data storage
    and delivery network, which lowers the cost of delivering data online.
    

The Social Data Player enables both technical and non-technical audiences to interact with data online. Much like media players are used for audio and video content, the SDPP allows scientists and analysts to download data in a multitude of formats including XML and JSON, while everyday citizens can access data through an easy to use interface. This interface provides accessible data sorting, searching, and filtering capabilities as well community features for dataset commenting, rating and discussion. Audiences can always stay current by subscribing to data updates via RSS/ATOM or email. In addition, the Social Data Player can be both redistributed and integrated with the world's most popular social networks, allowing audiences to republish data on their website or even share data through Facebook or Twitter.

Additional product information can be found at: http://www.socrata.com/solution.

About Socrata

Socrata, Inc. -- Making Data Social™ -- based in Seattle, Washington, is the world leader in social data discovery, a category of Web solutions that enable national, state, and local governments, to achieve new levels of transparency and citizen participation while significantly lowering the costs of serving online data. Socrata is a private company with venture financing from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. To experience Socrata social data discovery, visit www.socrata.com.

Socrata, Making Data Social, and Social Data Player are trademarks of Socrata, Inc. All other product and company names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Contact Information: Contact: Joshua Zecher 463 Communications Phone: (202) 463-0013, ext. 206 Email: josh.zecher@463.com