The contest will award a $20,000 Grand Prize to the top two teams, individuals or organizations that submit the most useful and user-friendly application that conducts innovative analysis of public companies. 

Today, over 8,800 public companies file XBRL-formatted financial statements down to the detailed level which makes rich content more available and functional than ever before. Legislation is pending that would require the use of XBRL-formatted data for reporting on all government program expenditures which could make XBRL-enabled tools for processing, reporting and analysis even more critical for investors, analysts, regulators, businesses, watchdogs, economists and academics.

Last year's XBRL Challenge was won by Calcbench, a web-based application that allows users to extract, analyze and share XBRL-formatted company financial data (http://calcbench.com)

XBRL US, the nonprofit consortium for XBRL business reporting, will accept submissions through February 28, 2013, with final judging and awarding of prizes to take place in late March 2013. As with last year's contest, contestants will be provided technical documentation and given access to the XBRL US database of XBRL financial fundamentals from all public companies. In addition, this year XBRL US will provide access to a baseline normalization of XBRL US GAAP concepts which will improve the ease of working with the database as well as the usability of the analysis that can be performed. This year's submissions will be required to perform certain analytical functions such as year-to-year, multi-company comparisons and ratio analysis.

The XBRL Challenge will be judged by a panel of experts drawn from academia, and the investment and technology communities:

-- Alfred Berkeley, Vice Chairman, Gentag, Inc.

-- Eric Gillespie, Founder and CEO, Poplicus

-- Kaitlin Lee, Senior Developer, Sunlight Foundation

-- Philip Moyer, Managing Director, Technology Group, Safeguard Scientifics

-- Paul Ratnaraj, Director - Advanced Initiatives, WRDS

Individuals, teams or organizations can learn more and enter the XBRL Challenge by going to http://facebook.com/XBRLchallenge. Updates will be shared on Facebook and on Twitter at @XBRLUS using the hashtag #XBRLCHALLENGE.