The first XBRL iPhone application has appeared (at least that I am aware of). The application, created by Brix for XBRL US, can be found on iTunes here. You can read the XBRL US press release here.
I installed the Brix Project XBRL application on my iPod Touch. It was simple enough. Go to the iTunes App store, search on XBRL, select the application, and install it.
The application certainly is no killer app which will change the world, but it does demonstrate some possibilities. If you are a business person, go try out the application and apply your imagination.
Oh the possibilities...
Generic Information Feed Engine
XBRL is "behind the scenes" providing the standard data payload and agreed upon business semantics making this work. We have a standard format for video (MPEG4), audio (MP3), pictures (JPEG), documents (PDF)....What is the standard format for business data which will make business information exchange work like YouTube or Flicker or iTunes or an iPhone?
I have always thought that this would be a fantastic idea and a great way to communicate the value of XBRL. You are probably familiar with a stock ticker. Years ago I had an application which showed New York Stock Exchange prices on my desktop with a 15 minute delay. It must have cost the NYSE millions of dollars to stream that information out and a lot of people find that stock price information valuable.
But there is other information in the world other than stock prices. What if any business could, for pennies (i.e. for far less than what the NYSE spent), make available a "ticker" of some sort to stream information to whomever they desired. I used to work for a produce distributor. They needed to know the price of lettuce in California, how much lettuce was in the fields of the 25 growers they worked for, the current price of lettuce which fluctuated between $2 per box and $30 per box, and other such inputs. They did this to set their price, serve the growers and satisfy their customers.
That produce distributor managed all this with phone calls, faxes, guess work, etc. I worked there as an accountant an build an interface which helped the buyers and sellers manage some of this information first in Microsoft Excel and then it was used so much that I converted it to Microsoft Access. These were the days before the Web, but we did have PC Anyware and dial up connects from one computer to another. These guys loved this system. It took a lot of different skills to weave all this together and it was held together with bailing wire and band aids.
I could build the same thing today, far cheaper, far more robustly using XBRL in the system. But what if I didn't have to do even that. What if I could go purchase or subscribe to a service where I simply plugged in an XBRL taxonomy, plugged in a URL to a repository of XBRL instance documents, put in a few configuration settings, and I could have all that literally for pennies.
What if there were a service similar to say YouTube or Flicker where you did not upload videos of photos, but rather you uploaded data feeds to some public or private set of business information? People do this today. But since that service does not exist (yet), they use Excel spreadsheets, email, and expensive human effort to fit all the pieces together. For example, a friend of mine is the financial officer of a university which exchanges benchmarking information with 25 other private universities. Another friend is in sales at a big company which benchmarks their information against other companies.
What if there was an iPhone or iPad or web browser application where you could do all this? You set the URL to some publicly available or private spot on the internet and share the boatloads of information we share the applications were as easy to use a an iPhone of Flicker or iTunes or Picassa.
Perhaps that will be the second XBRL iPhone app. What sort of application can you imagine?