Today during his keynote at PDC’10, Bob Muglia announced the launch of Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket!

Originally announced under the name Microsoft Codename “Dallas” at PDC09, DataMarket changes the way information is exchanged by offering a wide range of content from authoritative commercial & public sources in a single marketplace, making it easier to find and purchase the data that you need to power your applications and analytics.

Today’s key announcements around DataMarket include:

• DataMarket is now available at http://datamarket.azure.com with a new user experience and many new datasets from leading content providers
• Excel Add-in for DataMarket is available for download at http://datamarket.azure.com/addin
• PowerPivot refresh with DataMarket connectivity is available here.
• DataMarket is launching with 35+ content provider partners with content ranging from Demographic, geospatial, financial, retail, sports, weather, environmental and health care.
• Today we also announced some of our early adopter ISV/SI partners on DataMarket which include Accenture, SAS, Tableau, Dundas, Jackbe, Enroute, Sitecore, Pervasive, etc.

With this announcement, we will also be transitioning our blogging activities over to our new DataMarket blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/datamarket.

We want to say thank you to all of you who tried our CTPs and provided your feedback!

How do I transition from CTP3 to the V1 release announced today?

With the introduction of our new Marketplace at http://datamarket.azure.com our CTP 3 site will continue to remain live until Jan 28, 2011 to allow current CTP customers to transition their applications to the final release. Below are the steps you must take to transition your account and/or applications to use the new site. Please Note: Many of the datasets available in CTP3 were trial datasets and not all are or will be available in the commercial release. Some that will continue to be available will be commercial paid datasets.

1. Existing customer accounts will NOT be transferred automatically to the new marketplace, you will be required to register and agree to the DataMarket Terms of Use on the new portal the first time you purchase a subscription.
2. Existing subscriptions will NOT be transferred to new marketplace
3. Once registered, you can immediately start using free public domain datasets
4. Access to premium paid offerings will be rolled out to all DataMarket accounts by November 22, 2010. If you would like to request early access to paid offerings for your account, you can follow the instructions here.
5. You can download excel add-in to access marketplace at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=204983

- The “Dallas” Team