Coventry League
 
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There are two software tracking applications of the federal government stimulus package (formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).  One is the government’s, found at recovery.gov, which is oriented towards taxpayers who want to know how their tax dollars are being allocated. 

The other is provided by Onvia (ticker: ONVI), a Seattle-based public company.  Its application, found at recovery.org, is directed at businesses interested in bidding on projects, before it’s too late to do so.  An Onvia representative stated the application is free to use, since it's a means to attract incremental customers to the company’s subscription based data.  Fair enough, in our opinion.

Read more about it on GreenBiz.com’s blog by Marc Gunther or listen to an interview with the CEO on reason.tv. 
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Entrepreneurs often are known for being self-reliant, so it was not surprising to learn that Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, a Silicon Valley law firm, released a free, online term-sheet generator for venture financing. 

It is a savvy marketing effort by the law firm, and an instructive exercise for inquiring minds seeking venture funding.  By the way, if you have not heard of WSGR, it is likely you have heard of some of its current and former clients, including Dolby Laboratories, Apple, Google and YouTube.

Essentially, the tool enables a prospective entrepreneur to generate a preferred equity term sheet by answering a series of questions about the amount and tentative terms of a funding. 

As quoted on WSGR's website:

This tool will generate a venture financing term sheet based on your responses to an online questionnaire. It also has an informational component, with basic tutorials and annotations on financing terms.

In addition, the firm provides market data, highlighting private market financing trends for the past two years.  A sample draft term sheet can be viewed on scribd.com, too.

Several bloggers and media have presented overviews, including TechCrunch, Reuters and a related good article by Paul Johnson at StartupSD about 'Participating Preferred' term sheets.
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As some researchers might suggest, publicly available data can be tedious to extract.  Understanding this, Google unearthed a useful new tool that enables one to obtain publicly available data in an easy, straightforward manner.

Currently the tool is available with U.S. unemployment data.  According to Google’s blog about the new feature, the service will expand based on organizations volunteering to submit their data.

A few bloggers and editors wrote about this feature; Conor Clarke at The Atlantic and Anthony Ha at VentureBeat wrote concise summaries, and the Healthcare Economist demonstrated a variant of this tool using population data.
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