maybe so, but Bloomberg is the dominant player in most of the markets it operates in. Perhaps with this initiative Bloomberg is looking to embrace new markets as some of their previous cash cows continue to struggle as debt markets can't seem to put 2008 behind them. Empirasign is a market data company whose focus is transaction prices for OTC MBS transactions. We currently license our market data to Bloomberg for internal use. Our raw data is a series of email messages, and the output is basically one big table whose key index is the Blomberg Ticker--which thanks to Open Symbology (bysm.bloomber.com) is license free. One new market that comes to mind for Bloomberg is online ad rates. If I were starting a new finance start-up today, I'd focus on gathering transaction prices for online ads, organize them into some form that made sense to finance types, and publish this data to Bloomberg via their API. Now you have two take-out bids: One in the tech space, and the other in the finance arena. Anyone interested in this, message us: [email protected].