There's been no shortage of eye-opening mergers and acquisitions activity in the news lately. Tumblr might have been the trojan horse of the more recent and expensive M&A activity; OcculusVR, Nest and Whatsapp have made many Wall Street "experts" ask the bubble question.

With all this activity, one has to wonder if there's a way to incorporate oodles of largely unstructured data into financial valuation models? And, with those models, are people attempting to predict the next multi-billion-dollar deal?

It turns out that I am hardly the only one to ask those questions. According to its website, Mergerize "crowdsources predictions on mergers and acquisitions." Here's a screenshot of its interactive dataviz on potential acquisition targets:

Playing around, one can see some thoughts on the timing and value of a Square acquisition (the mobile payments company founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame):

Playing around with Mergerize is both fun and addicting, if not entirely accurate or scientific. (Think of it as a guide more than some type of "objective" valuation tool.)

Of course, there's tremendous incentive to try and game the system here. CXOs and investors would benefit from running up their own numbers with faux predictions and data. If you ran Twitter-based financial startup StockTwits, for instance, you would probably want to try to increase your magic number.

Simon says

Mergerize is one of a slew of tools today that potentially allows employees and organizations to make sense of the data deluge, a point that I made while speaking to executives at the SAS Global Forum in March. More than deploying any one tool, however, it's essential to embrace a visual mind-set. Creating interactive dataviz tools often supplants the need for dozens or even hundreds of standard reports, KPIs and dashboards.

It's never been easier and more important to ask questions of your data – to interact with it.

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