So I guess this is the closest thing to an official announcement that I can make.

My business partner and I are going to form a company which will concentrate upon statistics software. Our product will be called Ecstatistics which is a seriously good update of my old project SalStat. It differs in that:

a) It will be able to read data from CSV files, databases (a whole range), and spreadsheets. We plan to import SPSS and SAS files too as well as any other format we can code for;

b) It will output to a range of formats (PDF, OOo, databases, MS Office, HTML). The HTML is interesting because it will allow online analysis;

c) It will have a nice range of tests;

d) It will have a great graphing / charting capability;

e) It will be modular and easy to upgrade;

f) It will be far more usable than existing programs;

g) And of course, it will be open source;

Our plan is to get the product working (the database browser does already quite nicely) and produce a version for the OLPC project. Some people have asked for a stats program that works there already and it makes sense to equip students with (possibly) the most useful tool in scientific research: statistical analysis. So far, it can import from a range of databases and analyse the data descriptively. Output is only text for now and interaction is via a custom interactive interpreter, but it's early days yet. From what we've read, the important thing is to get something released and we hope to do that very soon.

Ecstatistics is coded in Python with NumPy, SQLAlchemy, SQLite and lots of other stuff. Because of this, we can code the OLPC version down to about 200k which competes extremely well with the opposition like R, SPSS and SAS. The interface is designed not just to be useful but also to instill good statistical practice, so it's educational too.

The interface will be designed with non-expert users in mind, particularly students. We aren't aiming at calloused statisticians; they have their favourite tools (and often write them for themselves anyway). We are aiming at all those people who have to do stats but don't like it.

In other news, I saw a couple of laptops here in the Phils in a major chain of electrical stores. They came with Linux preinstalled which was nice to see.

Finally, but most importantly, my wife had her scan earlier this week - we're expecting a little baby girl! The due date is the end of July and we're both very excited.