CEO Noah Pepper announced the acquisition this afternoon on the Lucky Sort’s website. The company has been building a visualization and data navigation engine called TopicWatch, which can discover real-time patterns in streams of data, and took in $500,000 in seed funding from Neu Venture Capital in early 2012.

The startup had operated in stealth mode, but it caught the attention of investors and the press when it raised seed funds from a roster of “big data” experts, including chaos theory physicist Dr. Norman Packard.

Pretty clearly, there’s a strong Twitter tie-in, as Twitter is nothing more than a live stream of data, continuously updated by millions of people. Where Twitter will use the technology was not fully disclosed, but Pepper did offer a hint.

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization, give us a shout.

Twitter has been beefing up its ad tools in the past few months, releasing new functionality for keyword targeting, self-service tools for interest, platform, fan, and gender targeting, and more. And as it ramps up for a possible IPO this year, it needs to give advertisers even better tools for placing, targeting, and evaluating their Twitter ad spend. It’s likely that Lucky Sort technologies will be helpful for that purpose.

In any case, the existing Lucky Sort toolset will be shut down, Pepper stated:

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

Twitter has been acquiring small companies at a fairly rapid pace lately, having just acquired big data startup Ubalo. And in 2012, Twitter was the fourth-most acquisitive company, buying a total of 10 startups and ranking just behind Facebook, Google, and Groupon.

Here is Lucky Sort’s full announcement:

Lucky Sort acquired by Twitter!

Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.

Today I’m very excited to announce that our journey has entered a new phase: Lucky Sort has been acquired by Twitter!

Several of us will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department, so if you’re in the neighborhood and want to talk about text mining or data visualization give us a shout.

We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter.

In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour.

Best,

Noah Pepper
Chief Executive Officer
Lucky Sort

Now it’s leading the way in 2013 IPOs for startups, filing for up to a $150 million initial public offering.

“Our mission is to help people see and understand data,” Tableau’s prospectus says. The company offers products that nontechnical folk can use to create rich, interactive charts and simulations based on raw data. Besides a public version, Tableau offers a variety of corporate and premium products which it calls an “alternative to BI,” or business intelligence.

Source: Tableau

Tableau cofounder/chief executive Christian Chabot

After receiving venture capital twice in its nine-year history — both times from NEA — totalling $15 million, Tableau reached $127.7 million in annual sales in 2012, more than double 2011 revenues and more than quadruple 2010 revenues. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 93 percent.

Tableau is profitable as well, although just barely: It’s IPO says it generated income of $2.7 million, $3.4 million, and $1.6 million over the past three years. The last number, for 2012, shows that the company was pushing hard for revenue at the expense of profit — sales and marketing expenses jumped from $30 million in 2011 to $62 million in 2012, and total operating expenses ballooned from $55.5 million to $112.8 million in the same period. Head count quadrupled from 188 in 2010 to 749 in 2012.

Don’t expect that to change quickly. One of the risks cited in the IPO prospectus says the company is still expanding quickly:

We expect expenses to increase substantially in the near term, particularly as we make significant investments in our sales and marketing organization, expand our operations and infrastructure both domestically and internationally and develop new products and new features for and enhancements of our existing products.

However, if the company can secure significant market share and reduce SG&A expenses as a proportion of revenue, Tableau could be wildly profitable. Gross profit on sales of its products was $117.4 million on $127.7 million of revenue, revealing a prime benefit of delivering your product via the cloud.

No firm date has been set for the IPO, but the companies stock ticker symbol will be “DATA.”

Competitors include established business intelligence giants like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP as well as startups such as Qlik Technologies, and Tibco Spotfire. And maybe even Google.

“Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Christian Chabot, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, told VentureBeat last year.

Big data may be cool, but it’s not pretty. Visual.ly, a startup focused on data visualizations and infographics, has raised a new $2 million round of funding, the company has confirmed to VentureBeat today.

Visual.ly’s platform is like a “basecamp” for design projects that want to utilize big data from multiple sources. It’s clients (brands, businesses, and news organizations) subscribe for access to the platform, which can match them with Visual.ly’s community of over 55,000 designers. Once matched,the designer and the client work together using the platform, with Visual.ly’s team acting as a project manager. Essentially, it answer the question of what do to for companies after they’ve hired a designer and don’t quite know what to do next.

“Right now existing ad agencies are our biggest competitors,” Visual.ly CEO Stew Langille told me in a phone interview. He explained that, in addition to building useful, interactive graphics for clients, Visual.ly is becoming more attractive because it allows designers to earn more money on a project and advertisers to spend less.

Depending on the level of project management, Visual.ly takes anywhere from 10 to 30 percent cut of each project’s total cost. The goal, Langille said, is to improve the collaboration platform for designers and clients to work on their own. And while he didn’t disclose financial figures, Langille did say that Visual.ly’s revenue is increasing 300 percent each quarter, and the number of projects are increasing 200 percent per quarter.

The new round came from previous investors, such as SoftTech VC, 500 Startups, and Giza Venture Capital, as well as strategic investors that include Yammer chief product officer James Patterson and several top executives from the advertising industry that will help Visual.ly build out its presence in New York City.

The additional capital will primarily be used to advance the startup’s data visualization /collaboration technology and hire more talent over the next year. Langille said Visual.ly has held off on raising a larger round, but does plan on raising additional funding in the future.

Langille also said he’d like to use the funding to produce more free data visualization tools that showcase the Visual.ly platform’s potential. For example, the startup’s recently released tool that interfaces with Google Analytics to produce a weekly traffic report, which you can send via email automatically. Also, the startup’s Twitter user battle infographic tool.

Founded in 2011, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup has raised a total of $4.4 million in funding to date. Visual.ly currently has 25 employees, with plans to hire another 10 to 15 people before the end of 2013.

Julia Gifford works with the Draugiem Group, a Latvian incubator.

Infographics have become an outdated method of data visualization. Recent developments in technology have allowed a new breed of data visualization to emerge — a prettier, more informative, easier to understand, and more marketer-friendly version. These new, more interactive graphics are about to push infographics out of the limelight.

Introducing the webgraphic

Infographics have enjoyed large-scale popularity over the past few years as an accessible means of data visualization. And with good reason. Infographics were great for displaying large amounts of data, making sense of complex information, and engaging readers more in the discovery of new patterns.

But those days are over. Now, infographics are being replaced with an even more visually appealing, effective, story-telling agent — the interactive infographic.

Ross Crooks, the creative director of Column Five, an agency, saw this coming. He wrote about the death of the traditional infographic well over a year ago, predicting that the future would lie in making infographics interactive. Props to him, because a year later we see that he was right. Over the past year we’ve seen visually stunning, animated, and interactive infographics pop up around the web.

This new interactive infographics differ from static infographics in that they let the viewer interact with them, discovering more on their own. They include elements such as animations and clickable links, which increase the viewer’s engagement as well as the credibility of the infographic itself.

But the phrase “interactive infographic” is a hassle. How about if we call it what it is: a “webgraphic.” That’s right, we’re coining a term.

Why webgraphic? Because an interactive infographic by definition must contain code. That means, instead of being a static image, it’s embedded in the web.

Why now?

Some might argue that the concept of the webgraphic was technically realizable many years ago, but they have really only surfaced in the past year.

This is the result of responsive design, an increase in technical capabilities, browser improvements to accommodate hardware acceleration to better support animations, and the availability of more options at designers’ fingertips, courtesy of HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and increased computing capacity.

Not to mention the accessibility of interactive infographics on tablets, considering that mobile devices account for a growing segment of Web usage in the U.S. and internationally.

Interactive storytelling

Infographics, in comparison to their interactive counterparts, help people focus their attention. By contrast, the narrative thread of interactive infographics can walk users through a series of steps, delivering information to help the viewer come to a conclusion.

Additionally, because the webgraphic is coded straight onto the web, it has the bonus that it can contain links to outside sources for increased interaction, credibility, and usefulness. This is all in comparison to a static infographic, which is simply an image.

A great example of using webgraphics to illustrate a point is the Daily Dose of Water webgraphic, which gives you helpful stats and lets you calculate your daily water use.

Increased traffic and social engagement

The benefit of your visual content being embedded on your page is that viewers will be directed to your website. This brings awareness of your URL. Later on, this can be beneficial in manipulating your visitors, converting them, and retargeting advertising to them later.

Locating a webgraphic on your web site has one primary benefit: Anyone sharing your amazing content will be directed to your site. The Future of Carsharing does this well. While this webgraphic provides interesting content, at the end it also links images to the parties who were involved in the creation of the webgraphic. It also includes a “share” banner at the top, which allows the webgraphic to be easily shared on social platforms (which then, of course, brings in more potential traffic).

One minus that must be addressed is that webgraphics are less user-friendly on social networks than static infographics. Because the webgraphic is embedded on a different webpage, the viewer has to leave the social platform in order to access the webgraphic. But once you get the viewer there, it opens the door to a world of possibilities in terms of converting the viewer to a customer.

Increase conversion rates and improve retargeting

The ability of integrating the webgraphic to a website has immense benefit to conversion rates. Infographics can only bring about brand awareness by putting their logo in the bottom, etc. However with a webgraphic you have so many more options.

Because of the ability to code the webgraphic, you can direct your reader to fulfill a goal. For example, DeskTime – one of the companies I work with at the Draugiem Group, a Latvian incubator — successfully added a “sign up” button at the bottom to capture interested potential customers. This is where you can take advantage and implement every conversion rate optimization trick in the book.

Because the webgraphic is on your site, you can add a re-tartgeting pixel to your site, and use it to target ads to people who have already checked out your webgraphic and are presumably interested in your topic.

Designers and marketers alike have understood the added benefit of interactive infographics. Those who are serious about getting the biggest return on investment have understood that the webgraphic is the way to go.

Julia Gifford is a Canadian-born Latvian technology enthusiast. She enjoys writing, and is currently with the Draugiem Group. You can find her on Twitter at @julijagifford.

Top image: A still from the Daily Dose of Water webgraphic.

The much-hyped data analytics startup ClearStory Data has pulled in $9 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and Google Ventures.

It’s still in its early days, but ClearStory is positioning itself as the next evolution of the typical analytics-heavy dashboard, which provides only a “rearview mirror” look into your data.

The problem is that valuable data lives in separate silos and often requires engineers to bring it together. ClearStory is developing the tools to pull in relevant data from Google, Twitter, Facebook and other sites and present it in a visually compelling way.

Silicon Valley-based ClearStory is one of a dozen technology startups that would support data services teams employed by large corporations — or replace data scientists altogether.

It’s certainly a crowded space, but it doesn’t hurt that founder and CEO Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan (pictured, left) has been an investor and advisor to Bay Area startups for years. She has a knack for joining startups that are ripe for acquisition. Prior to founding ClearStory, she worked at Kiva Software (acquired by Netscape for $180 million), Aster Systems (acquired by Teradata for $263 million), and Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6 billion).

ClearStory is still being baked by the company’s 20-person team and will not be generally available until 2013. However, it says what makes ClearStory stand out is its capability to pull data from disparate sources. “Not all data is born and lives inside your company,” Shahani-Mulligan says on the ClearStory blog.

Shahani-Mulligan says that simply retrieving a sliver of data from a single database or website can be a “chore.” ClearStory wants to provide an alternative to the legacy data visualization products on the market, including QlikView and Tableau, which the company blog describes as “cumbersome” and unequipped to handle unstructured data (texts, email, and so on).

Clear Story’s clear focus is its user experience and design. According to GigaOm’s Derrick Harris, who had a sneak peek of the demo,  it’s similar in feel to Platfora’s Hadoop-based software  – “pretty visualizations and lots of dragging, dropping and collaboration.”

[Top image credit:  Bruce Rolff/Shutterstock]

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

These days, it takes guts for a company to make a strategic decision without referring to the numbers. However, accessing the most useful data is easier said than done.

It’s extremely expensive for small to medium sized-businesses (SMB’s) to access the tools they need to store and model their data. Even if they fork over the cash for a business intelligence tool, there is little room left in the budget to hire a team of database analysts to manage the service.

Today, Chartio launches an alternative: an analytics dashboard for companies to visualize their data. The small team of founders have been working on the technology for several years, and aggressively testing it with users. As is increasingly the case with early-stage enterprise software companies (particularly those that can avoid selling to CIO’s), Chartio’s founders have been focussed on beautifying the product and making it easy to use.

“”I started Chartio out of frustration in the difficulty of visualizing the data in my database,” said Dave Fowler, Chartio’s CEO and cofounder.

“My idea was to build an interactive dashboard where even a business user could create charts, and engineers wouldn’t have to deal with learning different API’s, SQL syntaxes and charting libraries,” he explained.

At present, Chartio is marketing to startups and SMB’s that do not have the budget for a legacy vendor like Oracle or SAP. These companies, often in hyper-growth mode, will need all the help they can get to fend off stiff competition.

One of the first customers, Ticketbis, an international ticketing company, used the product to uncover patterns on how customers are buying tickets for concerts and other events. It turns out that a vast number of purchases that were made from outside the U.S. or the country of the event. In response, Ticketbis was able to tailor their product and expand into international markets.

“Chartio saved our business time and money in the long run because it provided us with easy access to see what our customers wanted from Ticketbis,” said Jorge Diaz Largo, product director of Ticketbis in a statement.  “For example we were able to drill down into our customer purchasing patterns,” he said.

Fowler is also trying to put an end to the the endless back and forth communication chains between marketing and IT departments. This game of email tennis typically occurs when a data needs to be stored, processed and packaged on a tight deadline.

Sign up to the service, and an IT rep will need to set up to the software to integrate with existing data sources, including Google Analytics, Oracle RDBMS, PostgreSQL, AWS RDS, Rackspace Cloud Databases, Heroku, and MySQL (a Salesforce integration is under development). Once the basic set-up is complete, it’s out of IT’s purview, and can be managed by any employee in an organization.

What may prove interesting to investors is that by appealing to marketing, sales and IT, the company has opened up its channels of distribution. This will be particularly useful if it ramps up its efforts to sell to larger enterprises.

With the launch today, Chartio is releasing a host of additional features. These include:

• Dashboard Filters: Visual, user-friendly controls that quickly shift every chart on a dashboard to a new metric. Date ranges can be changed with a slider that shows actual data, so customers can zero-in on when events actually happened – not just arbitrary calendar days – or the entire view can be pivoted per product, per category, or by any similar metric.
• Automatic Drill-downs: Chartio automatically drills through time-series or category-based charts, so nearly any line chart or bar graph will drill-down into more finite data ranges without any custom set-up work.
• Dashboard Layouts: A new grid system provides much greater control over how dashboards can be laid out, and scales to fit any size of display.
• Dashboard export and reporting: Any single chart can be downloaded as a PDF, PNG or CSV, whole dashboards can be downloaded for printing as a PDF, and PDF dashboard delivery can be scheduled by email for any Chartio customer.
• Improved Dashboard and Chart User Interface: Chartio continues to make readability and the presentation of beautiful data its top priorities. The new chart and dashboard interfaces showcase the data, letting controls, buttons and distractions blend into the background.

The San Francisco-based company is a recent graduate of Y Combinator, the highly-competitive Silicon Valley accelerator program. It has 800 customers and has experienced 30 percent growth month-over-month.

To date, the company has raised a total of $4.4 million from investors like Cloudera’s cofounder Jeff Hammerbacher, and Data Collective’s Matt Ocko. Crosslink Capital and Avalon Ventures participated in the most recent funding round.

For Pentaho, the  startup that claims to be the first business intelligence (BI) provider to shift its focus to  ”big data”, the bet is paying off.

The Orlando, Fl. based startup has secured $23 million in third-round funding, bringing its total funds to $55 million. It will devote the resources to its expanding its sales and marketing efforts, and will continue to invest in its analytics toolset that competes with  players like Tableau and QlikView.

In January, the company announced it would move its open-source business intelligence capabilities to the Apache license to make them more compatible with Hadoop, a mainstay of the big data movement. Hadoop, an open source computing framework, is offered under the Apache license, as as are most of the NoSQL databases that can process vast volumes of businesses’ structured and unstructured data.

It’s a similar story across the big data space — companies are experiencing unprecedented growth and are raising massive funding rounds with ease. Pentaho has found its niche with consumer tech and e-commerce companies; it is currently used by the likes of BeachMint, Kiva and Travian Games.

“Pentaho has a proven big data strategy with over 300 percent increase in big data sales for the first nine months of 2012 over the same period in 2011,” said Quentin Gallivan, chairman and CEO at Pentaho in a statement.

The round was led by New Enterprise Investors with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures.

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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Roambi, the Sequoia-Capital-backed data visualization app from MeLLmo, has seen considerable growth this year with new customer wins and adoption by 20 percent of the Fortune 50, the company announced Tuesday.

As we’ve written before, Roambi continues to be one of the hottest business-focused apps for iOS devices. The company’s Roambi Flow and Roambi Analytics apps have attracted more than 600,000 downloads to date, and 132 new enterprise-level clients have signed up this year. (At $795 per user licence, enterprise customers can bring in big bucks.) MeLLmo claims that eight of the top 10 largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the world are Roambi users.

Quinton Alsbury, MeLLmo’s president of product innovation, told VentureBeat that the company now has more than 300 large enterprise customers and more than 6,000 mid-size customers using its Pro offering. Comparatively, in May, the company had more than 230 large enterprise customers and more than 4,000 customers overall. Some of Roambi’s biggest customers are Siemens, the Dallas Cowboys, ABB, Telstra, Henkel, Sydney Airport, and DBRS.

“By all accounts, our growth trends continue alongside the enterprise quickly adopting iPads and iPhones,” Alsbury said. “With the iPad mini now launched, we expect even faster adoption. The reduced price tag will make it attractive to roll out to large salesforces, as an example.”

Another big recent win for MeLLmo is bringing South Africa to the table as a client. The South African government will use a custom Roambi app to help display and make sense of the country’s 2011 census results. The 2011 census was the third of its kind conducted by the democratic South African government.

MeLLmo partnered with Dataways, a South African technology firm, and Statistics South Africa to create the app for drilling down into huge sets of census data. “Roambi is what the field of statistics has been waiting for, to make our output meaningful, accessible, and enjoyable to all,” Statistician-General Pali Lehohla of Statistics South Africa said in a statement.

San Diego, Calif-based MeLLmo has raised $50 million from investors including Sequoia Capital. The company has its European headquaters in London, with satellite offices in Germany and France, and has small operational teams in Shanghai, Los Angeles, and New York. Roambi is available in 11 languages.

“Big data” isn’t just an enterprise trend. It’s a technological innovation that is already making a difference in your life.

Police are mixing crime data and sociological information to anticipate incidences of crime. A small cadre of scientists in Silicon Valley is harnessing genetics data to detect early signs of disease. For business owners and harried IT executives, it’s easy feel overwhelmed with the flood of so-called big data options on the market. That is, if you buy into the trend at all.

We believe it’s time to cut through the hype and show you some cool companies that use big data to further research in the fields of healthcare, law, government, and education. To assemble our inaugural list of 10 standout companies, we spoke with investors, analysts, and experts.

We narrowed it down to some ground-breaking favorites who helped define the field. You’ll notice that the companies cover a lot of ground — we anointed a leader in every category, such as data science, business intelligence, data visualization and analytics. We also threw a few impressive newcomers into the mix as well.

Meet our inaugural list of big data companies that are exploiting data in ways that you wouldn’t expect.

Data as a Service/Metamarkets

Michael Driscoll, Metamarkets’ CEO.

It’s been one heck of a year for Metamarkets, a startup that analyses things like tweets, payments, and check-ins for online publishers and web companies to better answer questions like: “Why are customers canceling their memberships?” or “How are users moving through the site?”In the spring, investors clamored to pour money into the San Francisco-based company, which currently has about $23 million in the bank. Aside from being freshly minted with venture funding, here’s why Metamarkets makes our shortlist.

It took guts to down an offer from Twitter: Michael Driscoll, who was Metamarkets’ chief technology officer at the time, wouldn’t back down from his vision to build a bigger company.

It has some cool customers: The technology sees use from digital media companies like the Financial Times and AOL, who need to get better insights on the value of their ad inventory.

“At the customer level, we’ve learned to paint our product in more emotional and less technological terms. Ultimately, big data and its technologies are not the story, it’s about helping people do their job better,” says Driscoll, who is now Metamarkets’ chief executive.

It has one straight-talkin’ CEO: Driscoll told me that we need to reexamine all the hoopla around Hadoop, the open-source computing software that is leveraged by companies like Twitter to store terrabytes of tweets per day: “It’s a service, not a solution,” he said. Driscoll told me he looks up to Aaron Levie, the 20-something CEO of cloud storage startup Box. He told me we need more founders who are willing to bring a natural-born salesman’s brand of personality and smarts to enterprise.

The technology is designed to be easy to use: Metamarkets provides a packaged Software-as-a-Service application so customers can get up and running in a few days. It scales as customer data volumes grow.

Bonus: Don’t miss Driscoll’s appearance at VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat conference.

Data Visualization/Tableau

Christian Chabot, CEO of Tableau

Tableau is a data visualization startup that appears on nearly every list of hot big data startups, but it hasn’t raised a funding round in four years. It is one of the small cadre of companies that are responsible for putting data visualization on the map. Here’s why Tableau made our shortlist.

It doesn’t need your VC cash: The startup’s last funding round in 2008 was for $10 million. It hasn’t taken a dime since then, and it’s on the road to profitability.

It’s changing the way we consume digital media: Tableau is a favorite for media folk experimenting with new ways to use data in their stories. Tableau offers a tool that lets anyone create gorgeous charts and maps for free, no programming expertise required. Reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post use it.

It’s putting data in the hands of people who need it: Big data can be useful for everybody in many ways — it’s not just a money-making tool for businesses. By putting this tool into the hands of a nonprofit like government watchdog California Common Sense (a current customer), Tableau’s software is analyzing volumes of political data to expose fraud and inconsistencies so voters can make informed, data-driven decisions before they vote.

Eat your heart out, Google: “Our mission, to help people everywhere see and understand data, isn’t all that different from Google’s,” Christian Chabot, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, told VentureBeat.

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bright.com, the recently launched startup with a scientific method to match you with a dream job, has found something cool to do with its backlog of employment data.

Bright doesn’t just want to find you a job, it wants to find you the job. With that goal in mind, it has developed a machine-learning algorithm that examines thousands of data points and crawls its jobs database to recommend a position for you. The user experience emphasizes personalized recommendations and discovery; it’s like Pandora for the job market.

Today, the startup has launched Bright Labs, a set of infographics and tools that shed light on the current employment landscape.

It’s early days still, but the company has already surfaced some interesting findings. In an interview with VentureBeat, Jacob Bollinger, Bright.com’s data scientist, told me anecdotally that most people job hunt on Friday afternoons, and over 50 percent of dental hygienists have CPR skills.

In addition, the company has done some research on the cities that experienced a bump in jobs in August. The results indicate that California is the place for jobs! Of the Top 10 U.S. Cities:

● San Diego, CA (104.77%)
● San Francisco, CA (28.88%)
● San Antonio, TX (19.05%)
● San Jose, CA (13.34%)

Anyone can use Bright Labs as a resource at any time during a job search, but the company will also release a bi-weekly report with its findings. Steve Goodman, the company’s CEO, told me he hopes people will use the site to mash up raw data to create their own graphs, charts, and reports. You can fill them with content from Bright Labs’ library of white papers and academic publications.

For Bright, the two major initial focuses are technology and politics. Tech is a hot job market, and Bright Labs will release data on the top tech cities for jobs, the tech companies with the most open positions, and the skills you’ll likely need to land a dream job at a startup. It will also investigate how the political elections will impact the job market, and whether the leading candidates are staying true to promises made on the campaign trail.

Bright Labs is comprised of five sections, which include information on jobs trends through the lens of pop culture and current events, positive trends within the slowly recovering or otherwise bleak market, and the wider employment landscape.

According to Goodman, the company has more data than any of its more established competitors in the online job search space, including Indeed.com and Monster. “We have millions of active listings,” he told me. “We realized we could do something special with all of this employment data.”

This isn’t the first time that Bright.com has leveraged its data. For over a year, the company has been building an algorithm they call the “the Bright Score.” According to them, it will generate the straightest, shortest path between two points: an open position and the perfect candidate.

With its focus on data science, the startup is a popular destination for hot-shot researchers and academics, and I’m told that the company even has a nuclear physicist on staff. Bright has raised $6 million in investment and is based in San Francisco.

Top Image via Shutterstock

Intoxicating indie rock band The xx and Microsoft have released a brilliant visualization app that tracks how a stream of the band’s new album Coexist spread virally around the world.

The visualization shows how music spreads insanely fast around the world thanks to social networks and email. The xx originally shared the link to a single fan, and soon after that person shared with friends, the number of people listening to the album stream explodes on the visualizer.

The Coexist visualization app is built in HTML5, as Microsoft (and many other companies) is trying to push more web developers and publishers to have their sites work without plug-ins.

“The Coexist site is built exclusively in HTML5, and we’ve engineered the experience to work plug-in free on all modern browsers, and in particular Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8,” Microsoft marketing manager Steve Lake wrote on Microsoft’s blog. “As with each project we undertake, this is yet another opportunity to step back and rethink what’s possible on the web. With The xx, it was about blending music, art, and technology – creating beauty in simplicity.”

Coexist is available for purchase today in the U.S. and streaming on Spotify. Based on a few listens, it’s easily one of my favorite albums to be released this year.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Everybody wants big data, but nobody wants to muck around in SQL queries. And while Hadoop is a hot topic, most people have no clue what it really does, let alone have the skill to use it.

That’s where business intelligence tools like Bime come in. Bime, which just launched version 4.0 of its browser-based data mining and data visualization tool, promises to make diving into enormous databases as pleasant as taking a swim in a cool city pool.

Well, almost. You still have to understand a little about database fields and pivot tables, but in a demo I saw yesterday, Bime was remarkably simple — and fast — at turning a database with more than 400 million rows into pretty bar charts, pie charts, and network visualizations. Essentially, it’s a more user-friendly front end for whatever gigantic databases you already have, and it’s one that marketing managers and sales executives can use, without a lot of handholding from the IT department’s database gurus.

The data on the back end can come from Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Google Analytics, and more traditional data repositories, such as MySQL, SQL Server, or Oracle.

Bime 4.0 adds support for Google BigQuery, a web service that lets you do queries against enormous data sets — databases with billions of records, for instance. The company also offers BimeDB, a hosted database that’s optimized for analytics, so companies can store their data with Bime as well as using it as the BI front-end.

Bime costs $60 to $240 per user, per month, depending on the options. For more details, check out this page of video demos that show what Bime does.

The company that makes Bime is called We Are Cloud, although it’s changing its name to BIME (in all caps, though I refused to spell it that way) to match its leading product. We Are Cloud has 15 employees and is based in Montpellier, France. It has raised several small rounds from angel investors in the U.S. and Europe but has not disclosed the total amount of its funding. We Are Cloud debuted in the U.S. at Demo Fall 2011.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Data visualization for huge sets of information can be hard, man. Datahero wants to make it easy, and apparently, some pretty interesting investors do, too.

The product is still in private testing stages, but it’s impressed (to the tune of $1 million) a few influential brainiacs who count data as their number-one obsession.

With just a few clicks in a normal web browser, Datahero users can gather information and turn it into pretty, useful graphs and charts. To start, you can import data sets from a range of online services. You can also upload corporate reports or spreadsheets of their own devising.

Then, the magic happens: Datahero’s invisible gears and levers sort and tag the information, leaving a normal-user-friendly UI that lets consumers focus on patterns and deeper meanings of data — all without any IT or statistical training.

“With Datahero, users of any ability can quickly and easily visualize the data that matters the most to them, without needing a data scientist or an IT department,” said Chris Neumann, CEO and cofounder of Datahero, in a release about the funding. “We literally enable any user to be their own data hero!”

Today, Datahero is announcing  it’s raised a $1 million round led by Foundry Group with participation from Neu Venture Capital, Dave Kellogg (a Salesforce SVP), data-focused entrepreneur Tasso Argyros, Argyros’ business partner and Stanford Ph.D. Mayank Bawa, data geek and entrepreneur Mike Greenfield, and Jonathan Goldman, another data-obsessed nerd with an MIT degree.

The Datahero team’s combination of big data expertise and elegant design was also attractive to Foundry Group managing partner Ryan McIntyre.

“What attracted us to Datahero is the data and design DNA in the founders’ background: a compelling mix of user-focused design sensibility and deep data scaling and analysis expertise,” McIntyre said in a release.

Datahero is based in Palo Alto, Calif., and was founded in 2011 by Neumann, a big data specialist, and consumer products guru Jeff Zabel (formerly of BMW).

Image courtesy of Peshkova, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Business intelligence app-maker MeLLmo, the creator of ultra-hot business iPad app Roambi, has launched a new app-building platform called ESX that will let other companies tap Roambi’s ability to make data gorgeous and accessible.

Roambi ESX will give companies that sell data for a living a way to create co-branded iPad apps without hiring design teams. ESX will let business create specialized publications that include text, images, Roambi data visualizations, and video and then publish the whole thing to the iPad.

The target audience for the platform will be the many small and large firms that collect and distribute data, Quinton Alsbury, MeLLmo’s president of product innovation, told VentureBeat. Ideally, many research firms would want to offer an iPad application that enhances their data sets, but many of these firms don’t want to pay for the development costs or hiring a mobile team. If they decide to use Roambi ESX, Alsbury said, it makes their lives easier and could be a boon for sales.

“There are hundreds of thousands of small niche research shops, and many of those will find this relevant and important,” Alsbury said. “One day, many apps in the App Store will be powered by Roambi.”

Specifically, Roambi wants to go after these types of companies with ESX:

• Information Publishers: syndicated research, market analysis, economic trends
• Marketers: interactive marketing brochures, newsletters, consumer behavior reports
• Corporations: corporate responsibility reports, investor reports, sales reports

MeLLmo said it will not be releasing pricing for access to the platform and that “interested parties can contact a Roambi salesperson for more information.”

San Diego, Calif.-based MeLLmo raised $30 million from Sequoia Capital this past September. Alsbury said ESX will help the company take advantage of its momentum in the market and help the company expand beyond simply making striking business intelligence applications.

Photo credit: MeLLmo

Precog launched at the Strata Conference in February, and developers across a variety of verticals are already using the beta version. Eli Portnoy, CEO of ThinkNear, which offers hyper-local mobile display ads within 100m of any location, is using Precog’s beta to capture thousands of interactions per second, and then surface targeted insights to advertisers.

Kirill Sheynkman, senior director of RTP Ventures, which led a $2 million funding round announced today, said there has been an investor frenzy around big data, but Precog is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the exploding market.

Importantly, Precog can analyze the growing amount of unstructured and semi-structured data like texts, tweets, and emails that offer a potential gold mine for application vendors.

“For an investor who spent 20 years building data-centric infrastructure businesses, seeing something shiny in big data’s murky waters was an epiphany,” said Sheynkman, who will join the board of directors alongside SendGrid CEO, Jim Franklin.

Precog chief executive John De Goes built the company to create the world’s first data intelligence-as-a-service offering. Application developers (ISVs) are becoming more savvy about leveraging data, but it can take months, or even years, to build a full infrastructure in-house.

He said the company aspires to be the Twilio of the space, referencing a company known for its dead-simple APIs. “We provide application vendors with the ability to solve any problem in data analysis without having to write piles of code,” he said.

De Goes has come a long way since being selected for the Boulder class of TechStars in 2011. Shortly after graduating from the startup accelerator, De Goes closed a seed round for ReportGrid, which provides SaaS vendors with nifty data visualization tools.

In addition to RTP Ventures, Resonate Venture Partners and TechStars‘ founder David Cohen also participated in Boulder-based Precog’s new funding round.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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DataSift, a social data platform that extracts large amounts of data from a number of online sources, raised $7.2 million in a first round of funding from existing investors IA Ventures and GRP Partners, the company announced today. The funding will aid in accelerating its growth with real-time and historic social data due to consumer demands.

Over the last four years, DataSift has developed technology and software that filters through billions of tweets for simpler analysis. The company boasts over 200 corporate customers in its portfolio that is also inclusive of Fortune 500 businesses.

The company’s ability to mine social data from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other mediums is helping businesses understand how its social marketing is reaching out to the public by providing analytic and visualization tools. For nearly $200 per month a business can use the service to enhance the productivity of their social data and analyze consumer interaction.

“DataSift has been flooded with interest from both customers and investors since our launch in November. We are seeing incredible demand from a wide variety of sectors of customers, including Social Media Monitoring, Business Intelligence, News and Finance,” Rob Bailey, CEO, said in a press release. “While we were not actively looking for financing, we were lucky to receive a fantastic offer from our existing investors that will enable us to continue building our business without the distraction of raising a funding round.”

To date the company has raised over $15 million in funding.

Photo via Ken-Lee

Digesting big data can be migraine-inducing. Knoema wants to make it as easy as scanning a graph.

“With data, we want to do what YouTube did for video,” Vladimir Bougay, founder and CTO of startup Knoema, told VentureBeat in a recent interview. Knoema’s site lets users create their own simple infographics containing tables, charts, maps, images, and text to help them tell a story.

The process is DIY, but the end result is a slick-looking and shareable page that lets you select and display the patterns and trends you find in the data you or anyone else has uploaded. (We’ve included some sample Knoema user-created graphics below.)

That’s the other fun part about Knowma — the data itself. The startup has already collected more than 500 datasets on various topics and slapped a search engine on top to make navigation easier. You can also upload any data you have on hand. You could, if you so chose, mash up your own private data with data from public sources.

“I think it’s one of those businesses that would have increasing returns as people use it,” said Will Price, chief executive at Flite, after watching the company show off its site at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Calif. today. “I thought it was a very impressive product.”

Above all, said Bougay, the process is fast. “Users can build tables/charts very quickly, download data in Excel format, save data views, and share them with friends. It takes minutes, not hours,” the founder told us. “If you have a story based on data to tell, you will find all the necessary tools at Knoema.”

You can share data dashboards, complete with links, maps, charts, and graph with other users through the usual variety of social networks. You can also export them to PowerPoint or embed them on blogs or other sites.

But you know who really loves data? Educators. “We have exposed Knoema to a few universities in the U.S.,” said Bougay, “and a number of professors have decided to use Knoema as a platform for teaching.” Columbia Business School, for example, has taken advantage of Knoema for its healthcare business instruction.

Despite the attraction, there are concerns about its business model. “The go-to-market thing might be a challenge and will you have a credibility issue with the data. You know, how we criticize Wikipedia,” said John Dillon, chief executive of Engine Yard.

Bougay points out that open data and big data have been hot topics of late. “However, there is no one common understanding of what all these data issues are about and what does it practically mean for data users,” he said. “While data is all around the web, one would have to go through a number of tedious tasks to put together and share/disseminate a simple data-driven content … There are two practical problems that Knoema is meant to solve: finding relevant data and getting it in a ready-to-use format for content building.”

One of the bigger problems around exploring data is that normal search engines aren’t great at parsing requests for raw data or returning data-focused results, especially results you can immediately use or incorporated into research and story-telling. “The ultimate goal of using data is to make an argument, tell a story, or come up with an informative decision,” said Bougay.

The startup is currently working on adding more visualization options and analytics tools. Knoema is also working on a “simpler and smarter” UI with collaboration features for friends or teams to build dashboards and graphics together.

And, of course, the startup has an eye on developers. Bougay said he wants to make Knoema not just a consumer-facing product but also a platform for data-driven apps from third-party developers.

Knoema was founded in 2011 and is based in Washington, DC, with R&D and data teams located in Perm, Russia and Bangalore, India. Knoema has been bootstrapped to date and is looking for investors that share its vision.

Knoema is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Top image courtesy of alphaspirit, Shutterstock

“We want to do to data analysis what Apple has done to computers: Make data so intuitive that anyone can gather insights from tons of data,” said Metalayer Chief executive Chris Burrage in an interview with VentureBeat.

MetaLayer helps you gather insights and make visualizations, also known as infographics, from massive amounts of data on the web. The company has poised itself as the “Photoshop of data,” mainly because you can drag and drop sets of data onto one another to help make sense of datasets with graphs and diagrams, much like adding layers to a Photoshop image. You can import pictures, statistical figures, Twitter feeds, documents, and news feeds into MetaLayer’s dashboard and then analyze them for trends or other insights. Metalayer aims its service at data analysts, non-profits, and journalists who may not have the immense knowledge needed to analyze huge amounts of data, nor the money to pay for a robust system to do it for them.

Now the company is launching a community platform called Delv, where infographics can be vetted and shared. People can pick apart the data that others have put together, and point out flaws or ask questions. Down the road the company hopes the platform will become a place to share data visualizations created by “real people”, not statisticians and professional analysts.

“Our new community project platform, Delv, is for people to come delve into the information analyzed on our site,” said Burrage. “People can look at infographics and other visualizations that community members have created, see the raw data that went into making them, mix up the data, and point out weak points.”

The company graduated in December 2011 from DreamVenture’s incubator and launched its dashboard, which is still in beta, in November 2011. MetaLayer also offers two APIs, imgLayer and dataLayer. ImgLayer takes words and objects from images and makes tags out of them, and dataLayer adds context to social data. Right now all the services are free, but in the future MetaLayer plans to charge for premium services such as private infographics that aren’t automatically shared with the community. It also plans to license infographics that are created by members at some point.

MetaLayer is based in Philadelphia and is run by a three-man team.

“Each ’1′ is a location that moves with the conversation on Twitter. Their scale varies depending on the volume of Tweets posted from the location they represent. You can see the main wave move from right to left, and then a second one that occurred at 11 p.m. around the world,” Twitter wrote in a blog post explaining the visualization.

This isn’t the first time the company has released a video to show the global impact of how its users are reacting to a particular moment in time. In June, Twitter released a set of videos that showed the Global pulse of tweets during various events, like the World Cup and some of the major natural disasters experienced over the last year.

As you can see from the video, Twitter is certainly flexing its real-time data muscles. We’ve embedded it below. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Visual.ly’s service is similar to document-sharing site Scribd in that it provides an easy way for people share information. But rather than simply uploading pretty infographics, the startup is aiming to give users tools to build custom visualizations — no design or animation experience required.

“Both regular and interactive infographics [bring in] a lot of interest (page views) for publishers,” said Visual.ly co-founder and chief marketing officer Tal Siach in an interview with VentureBeat. “But, to make a pie chart move is not that easy.”

Siach is correct. A lot of time, effort and energy goes into producing a comprehensive infographic. It requires skilled designers, lots of data collection and superior creative direction. “It would take hours and hours to create an infographic in Photoshop, which is why we want to simplify the process so that anyone can create them by selecting options and entering specific data,” he said.

The company launched an exclusive Twitter Visualizer Project, which shows off some of the capabilities Visual.ly plans to offer its users. Using Twitter’s API, the project generates a personal infographic based on a user’s tweets. You can customize avatars, compare two different Twitter celebrities and/or alter the look and feel of the image.

With 34 celebrities, five mouths, seven hair colors, 12 hair styles, two genders, 11 outfits, two positions and 28 accessories, the Twitter Visualizer can put each Twitter user in 17,592,960 different scenarios, the company said. A tool like could do great things for online news reporting.

The Twitter Visualizer is actually pretty cool. Yet, Siach said it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what the company wants to do.

Eventually, the company wants to create a subscription-based service for publishers, advertisers and anyone else seeking custom data visualizations. The service will go beyond what’s available to the regular community and give subscribers access to several different kinds of customizable data.

Visual.ly made waves when it debuted its closed beta at the 500 Startups Demo Day event in April. Since then, the company has had over 60,000 people sign up for beta invitations as well as a long list of talented graphic designers looking to show off their work. The startup has already forged many partnerships with publishing, design and distribution companies. Those partners include The Atlantic, CNN Money, eBay, Inc. Magazine, GOOD, OMD, National Geographic and Smirnoff.

Here’s a look at Visual.ly’s Twitter Visualizer Project at work: @VentureBeat vs. @MikeTyson:

Quick: what words are Silicon Valley singles more likely to use than other Americans when describing themselves on Internet dating sites?

Try these: queer, decadent, robot, raiding, wacky and telepathic, to name a few.

Musician and exerimental media dude R. Luke Dubois aggregated data from 21 online dating sites in order to create this awesome visualization of the 20,262 unique words found in the dating profiles of more than 19 million single Americans. He then combined that info with geographical data to create an atlas of how people describe themselves and the people they want to be with. Each word appears in the place it is used more frequently than anywhere else in the country.

So why do we care? Dubois’ project underlines the fact that we can learn a lot about the people who live within a certain geographic area by mining data from social networking sites and combining that with locational information. The result is a powerful way to gain insight into what makes a community tick.

The singles data was harvested from Match.com, LavaLife, PlentyOfFish, Chemistry.com, Ok Cupid, Nerve.com, eHarmony, SinglesNet, PerfectMatch.com, FriendFinder, Great Expectations,  AmericanSingles.com, Date.com, Christian Mingle, Gay.com, Blacksingles.com, Jdate, AsiaFriendFinder, Alt.com, and Collarme.com.

And in case you were wondering, this is not an April Fool’s joke. The technorati just really love their robots, okay?

Know a company that is doing interesting things with social network/geographic data along these lines? Call them out in the comments.

[Image via R. Luke Dubois]