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Creative Endeavors

How to Make Money off Data Visualization

It is one thing to have a database (or several) of information, but how you use and present the information is key to achieving company objectives.

What makes a good visualization?

  • Effective: the viewer gets it (ease of interpretation)
  • Accurate: sufficient for correct quantitative evaluation
  • Efficient: minimize data-ink ratio and chart-junk
  • Aesthetics: must not offend viewer's senses (e.g. moire patterns)
  • Adaptable: can adjust to serve multiple needs

There are many types of solutions on the market to help you achieve your objective for visualizing your data. Here are some of your options, researched for you by Creative Endeavors.

FREE Data Visualizers

  • Data360 is a collaborative data dashboard.  With Data360, any organization can collaboratively analyze and report on key metrics, in a private or public fashion. We built the software so that anyone can have and build one or more of their own Data360’s for free, as long as they are willing to a) share all their data openly and b) potentially, although not in the current version, have small advertisements on their pages. For those who want the software and access to the public data on the site, but still want to keep their data private, the software is available for a fee.
  • IBM's Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Anyone can upload data. Our visualizations work from simple tables of data. In practice, this means you can upload data by cutting and pasting from Excel spreadsheets or tab-delimited text files.
  • What big issue would you tackle if you could harness the collective intelligence of a large community of problem solvers? Think about a problem your organization faces, the big, intractable, Gordian knot one you’ve been unable to solve. When you’re ready to discuss, fill out a Insight challenge submission form. The Insight leadership team reviews every challenge application individually. If a challenge is selected for feature consideration, we contact the organization to discuss working together to articulate the problem to the community and to publish the data the community will need to help solve the problem.
  • Swivel's mission is to make data useful so people share insights, make great decisions and improve lives. Swivel is a Web site that makes it easy for everyone to collaborate and explore data together — because better informed people make better decisions: in voting booths, in corporate boardrooms and at neighborhood meetings. If you upload data for the public, Swivel is free. If you upload data and choose to keep it private and secure, there will be a fee. After we finish our preview period we will introduce a private edition of Swivel to keep your personal or business data private and secure while at the same time allowing you to compare your data with all the free, publicly available data in Swivel.

Commercial Visualizers

  • ADVIZOR desktop products free both business managers and IT folks from the headaches of traditional business intelligence platforms.  With ADVIZOR, there are no platforms to purchase, there are no scripts to write, and best of all, there will be no more waiting for answers to your next business questions. Simply import your data with a friendly wizard, and through your choice of 15 different charts including scatter plot graphs, bar charts, pie charts, and datasheets, ADVIZOR helps you understand relationships, make connections and get answers.
  • Clementine, the SPSS data mining workbench, enables your organization to quickly develop predictive data mining models and deploy those data mining models into your organization's operations - improving decision making. Using Clementine's powerful, visual data mining interface and your business expertise, you can quickly interact with your data and begin discovering patterns you can use to change your organization for the better.
  • ClickTracks offers intuitive, insightful analysis of your web site. It shows you campaigns, site navigation patterns, PPC, SEO and ROI stats instantly. ClickTracks is a web analytics program that uses a radically different architecture, making it easy for marketers to perform desktop datamining activities that are difficult or impossible to implement using traditional web analysis methods.
  • CenterView's Corda enterprise is a performance dashboard solution collects data from virtually and all business intelligence, ERP, database, spreadsheet, and operational applications and presents it using executive dashboards, scorecards, and company-specific data visualizations for anyone needed to make decisions. Our performance dashboard CenterView enables the broadest possible insight and access to enterprise information and can be used on any web browser or internet enabled device.
  • Data Description, Inc.'s Data Analysis and Exploration instantly reveal patterns, relationships, subgroups and exceptions in data. When you use our software, you are using the same visualization tools we use in our own contract analysis services. They offer a range of functionality from entry-level Excel add-ins to our full-capacity flagship product, Data Desk.
  • IDL's new Intelligent Tools, or iTools™, provide a powerful and flexible set of interactive utilities for any IDL user. As an IDL novice or casual user, you can quickly and easily open, analyze and visualize your data and produce stunning, publication-quality graphics. The iTools are made up of five pre-built tools:
    • iPlot provides 2D and 3D graphing
    • iSurface allows for surface representations of 2D array data and irregularly sampled point collections
    • iContour enables the production and anipulation of contour plots
    • iImage provides image display, exploration, ROI definition and basic processing
    • iVolume is used for the rendering and dissection of volumetric data
    • iMap allows you to work with geolocated data
  • ILOG Discovery is a visualization tool for analyzing data sets intuitively and communicating findings within an enterprise information system. It also serves as an interactive tool for browsing and editing databases, using a direct manipulation paradigm instead of a form-based query system. It is available for free for a limited time period, while some of its features are made available for professional uses in the JViews charts module.
  • InFlow performs network analysis AND network visualization in one integrated product -- no passing files back and forth between different programs like other tools. What is mapped in one window is measured in the other window -- what you see, is what you measure. InFlow excels at what-if analysis -- change the network, get new metrics -- just 2 clicks of the mouse. InFlow is designed to work with Microsoft Office and the WWW. You do not need to be an expert in statistics to use InFlow.
  • For those who need a powerful and flexible 3D visualisation application, IRIS Explorer™ by NAG is the most advanced visual programming environment for 3-D data visualisation, animation and manipulation available today. Its easy to use point-and-click interface means that users spend less time programming and developing customised visualisation applications. The extensive library of 'modules' (software routines) included put a wide range of advanced visualisation and analysis techniques at users' fingertips. Simply select modules from the library and connect them to interactively read and visualise data for analysis, presentation and publication.
  • Mindjet makes software that helps people visualize and use information. Its leading product, MindManager software, enables individuals and teams to work smarter, think creatively, and save time every day. There are over 970,000 licenses of MindManager software used globally by 85 of the Fortune 100 companies and more than 50 percent of the Global 2000.
  • To reveal the hidden value in your data warehouse, Purple Insight delivers MineSet, an integrated suite of software tools for data mining and data visualization. MineSet revolutionizes the way you use data mining for Business Intelligence. With MineSet 3.2, the power of visual data mining, previously available only to UNIX users, is extended to the Windows desktop.
  • Traditional segmentation techniques rely on you to select the criteria eg. sex, age, buying behaviour etc. NetMap is different: NetMap answers the questions you didn’t even know to ask. By simultaneously analysing millions of pieces of data, NetMap can identify groups of customers by criteria you would never have considered. In one case, NetMap helped a leading Australian bank find three very specific, previously unconsidered groups of high value customers, each sharing their own distinctive characteristics or "fingerprints." With NetMap you can pinpoint and target segments with a degree of accuracy never before possible.
  • Oculus for .NET and Oculus for Java™ Technology are commercial software products for business visualization application development and deployment. These are state-of-the-art class libraries and rendering engines that make it possible to deliver what can be imagined - powerful best practice solutions as well as unique and creative solutions. GeoTime™ is an Oculus commercial product for the concurrent visualization of geospatial and temporal data. With GeoTime, analysts save time, and gain more insight working with complex data over space and time within a single, highly interactive 3D view.
  • OpenViz from Advanced Visual Systems is a comprehensive data visualization system for all Java and Microsoft platforms that enables solution designers to create and deploy interactive visual presentations from any type of data.  OpenViz offers over 150 charts, visualizations, data management techniques and deployment options for use in all types of applications in any industry.  Unique features include interactive user experience, visualization of extremely large datasets, high-performance rendering, exceptional control over look-and-feel, easy server and desktop deployment, real-time updating, and more. 
  • Raptor Analytics' RapAnalyst software transforms complex data into actionable information. RapAnalyst is unmatched in its ease of use, speed of interpretation and ability to deliver understanding of complex data sets through visualization. Unlike traditional statistical techniques, RapAnalyst approaches data analysis holistically and shows the relationships between ALL attributes in a data set, as opposed to targeting specific attributes that are assumed to be relevant. This allows RapAnalyst to deliver high levels of predictive accuracy, even when dealing with missing data or data that has been poorly measured
  • S-PLUS, the industry's premier solution for exploratory data analysis and statistical modeling, delivers a comprehensive set of modern data analysis functions and methods that enable analysts and researchers to perform more insightful analyses, create revealing graphics, and make more informed business decisions. Based on the flexible S language, S-PLUS it is the de facto standard for flexible statistical analysis from academia to commercial research.
  • With Spotfire, operational teams are armed with an easy to use, self-service environment that allows users to run at their own speed, discovering new insights and addressing emerging threats. Publishing and sharing analytic applications that span business processes facilitate the exchange of new ideas and enforce best practices and accepted analytic procedures across an organization. Solutions by Application:
  • Tableau is a product suite for visual analysis and web-based analytics. It’s for discovering, visualizing and publishing data. Answer any question with an easy drag & drop interface. Understand databases and spreadsheets of any size. Display information visually in seconds. Answer a series of questions using interactive visual analysis.
  • TheBrain Technologies is the leading provider of visual content management solutions. By connecting people, processes, and information, TheBrain's products provide unparalleled context for smarter information discovery and more informed decision-making. TheBrain technology can be utilized on corporate intranets, desktops, and the Internet. Some applications include: customer care, project management, dynamic mind mapping, IT management and helpdesks, impact assessment, competitive intelligence, marketing and sales support, and personal information management. TheBrain has two primary products: PersonalBrain for individual users and BrainEKP, an enterprise knowledge platform for group collaboration.
  • The Thinkmap SDK enables organizations to incorporate data-driven visualization technology into their enterprise Web applications. Thinkmap applications allow users to make sense of complex information in ways that traditional interfaces are incapable of. Thinkmap SDK includes a set of out-of-the-box configurations for solving common visualization problems, as well as new visualization techniques for customizing data displays.
  • ThinkAnalytics develop data mining and knowledge discovery solutions designed to automate the analysis and interpretation of large data sets. With a focus on developing the most sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, data mining software to automate business analysis.
  • Google Acquired Gapminder's Trendalyzer in March 2007. A search on the software reveals a "down" website. It's worth keeping an eye on what Google is doing in this space.
  • VisuMap is a unique software application specially designed to help people to understand high dimensional data. It enables people to spot trends, patterns and regularities in multivariate datasets as easy as inspecting 2D and 3D maps.
  • Visual Mining provides developers worldwide with the graphing tools necessary to produce outstanding, reliable, and dynamic graphic solutions. Our award-winning charting software is used in thousands of implementations, in hundreds of industries, in all kinds of applications. NetCharts® products are found everywhere - from providing drillable financial reporting applications for management, to supplying doctors with patient diagnostics, to enabling easy-to-read manufacturing statistics on the factory floor. Additionally, NetCharts charting and reporting software provides graphical features found in the software industry's most popular and respected brand-name applications.
  • With Antartica Software's Visual Net a user can see a problem in a dashboard, explore the issue in our visual reporting interface, then produce appropriate report(s) to take action.  The process can also work in reverse where data is pumped from detailed reports such that issues can be investigated in Visual Net. Visual Net makes use of current technology standards and products like XML, Web services, Linux, and MySQL for ease of integration.  Visual Net communicates with the end user via a standard browser. 
  • As one of the first predictive analytics companies in Europe, Viscovery is among the leading vendors of data mining software. You will benefit from Viscovery through its unique and intuitive approach to data exploration, visual cluster analysis, and target group definition, even if you have another data mining software already in use.
  • Visokio developed data visualisation software products that broke new ground in both power and accessibility. Embed rich and interactive data-driven Flash files into your web pages and presentations and bring them to life with FeatureFinder. Omniscope is a powerful desktop application for:
    • Visualizing and analyzing data from spreadsheets and databases
    • Interactive navigation and filtering of complex information
    • Effortless editing, merging and cleaning of data
    • Browsing images, maps and integrating media with data
    • Combining geographical mapping with data mining
    • Publishing and distributing information in lightweight files