Kevin,

>Actually, many VFP people with great entrepreneurial spirit and good business sense would love the BI arena. Tons of data (and I guess you win the argument....PowerPivot has auto-spanning, haha).

Could you give some pointers ?
I did quite a lot of data mining in the last 25 years, but only once enough to "set up shop". Even only for selling services, as "over here" the data pool is behind very high walls, I see no large opportunities. After getting access as a dev [doing those things IT dept could not do] I sometimes built a reputation to sift meaning from data, but would never have been able to get such jobs as a service provider without already existing ties into the company. I founded one company doing model building, but in that special case I already had a lead into the buying company as I was providing most of the raw data<g>.

Perhaps I am missing some ideas as I don't submit to twitter, mySpace et al. and therefore might miss some opportunities in that area and I will be looking at Google API's, but further than that I see currently no tempting niches for "entrepreneurial spirit", but would love to have at least some of my blind spots removed ;-) At least the name I'm working under is already in this direction again.

tia

thomas