Congrats to this very talented team; I've had the privilege of seeing a few early demos and the product is so easy to use without sacrificing power or richness.
Congrats on the funding. The product looks really appealing.
I'm curious about the typical (expected) use case for something like this. I would think a lot of large-scale data consumers would already be using an end-to-end solution that includes at least halfway decent visualization tools - whether it's Tableau or ELK/Elastic.
Will customers be more likely to be smaller businesses who right now have limited data viz tools? Or developers who need to make something quick and dirty and don't want to wade through d3? Or existing customers of major data platforms who aren't happy with the visualization they provide? Or something else entirely?
Great question! We're different than other tools because we're an ingredient component that developers add to their applications and services (Tableau + others are standalone tools).
We're working with larger companies, like Simply Measured, who are using Reflect to power their customer-facing products.
Most companies (large or small) don't have the core competency for data visualization in-house -- Reflect helps fill that gap.
Hey phonon, I'm one of the cofounders at Reflect. Were you a Polychart user? Let me know if you'd like to compare Reflect to Polychart and I can get you in to kick the tires.
That's interesting from the standpoint of their license says "free for non commercial use" and then "for commercial use see https://polychart.com" which errors as like you said they went out of business.
Hey njx! I'm Brad, one of the cofounders of Reflect. We totally agree that a lot of the front end for visualization has been commoditized (although I'd argue it still gets misused pretty badly). But building all the infrastructure to support visualization is still left as "an exercise for the reader" which is where we come in!
I think that Tableau and Qlik (and QuickSite to a degree!) are great tools and they've helped make visualization and the infrastructure to do it available to people who previously didn't have it. We're extending this to any developer on the planet by using tools we are all familiar with: REST and Javascript. And since the whole internet wants to interact with visualization we're doing it at a new level of scale.
Happy to talk through the details with you, my email address is in my profile--just ping me and we can schedule some time!
honestly is this what passes for "data visualization" with these guys? A weekly stacked area chart?? You've been able to do this in Excel for 30 years. It worked fine on a 386. Where's the progress here..
Data visualization is about multi-gig, possibly streaming data sets, and crucially, parsing the data, probably in real time, for the crucial 1-2% of it that's actually interesting, and helping user find them. Not putting a thin SASS wrapper on stone age graphics whose underlying data size is probably measured in kilobytes
This thing looks like a charting service. Not "data visualization".
34 comments
[ 186 ms ] story [ 1216 ms ] threadCurious if you guys use proprietary graphing libraries or wrap something like d3 in custom skins.
I'm curious about the typical (expected) use case for something like this. I would think a lot of large-scale data consumers would already be using an end-to-end solution that includes at least halfway decent visualization tools - whether it's Tableau or ELK/Elastic.
Will customers be more likely to be smaller businesses who right now have limited data viz tools? Or developers who need to make something quick and dirty and don't want to wade through d3? Or existing customers of major data platforms who aren't happy with the visualization they provide? Or something else entirely?
Great question! We're different than other tools because we're an ingredient component that developers add to their applications and services (Tableau + others are standalone tools).
We're working with larger companies, like Simply Measured, who are using Reflect to power their customer-facing products.
Most companies (large or small) don't have the core competency for data visualization in-house -- Reflect helps fill that gap.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150908004847/https://www.polyc...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213349/https://www.polyc...
(video still works! http://play.vidyard.com/aDsHgEC9IPpqN52MfmpsCA.html ) and https://web.archive.org/web/20150924213345/https://www.polyc...
and their blog is still up
http://blog.polychart.com/
Perhaps the founder would make it MIT/BSD at this point?
Anyone want to tweet at her? https://twitter.com/lisaczhang
Also, for some history... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5519893
Visualization has become commodity, it is what you do to simplify the path from data to viz is important. http://infocaptor.com/visualization-gallery.php
I think that Tableau and Qlik (and QuickSite to a degree!) are great tools and they've helped make visualization and the infrastructure to do it available to people who previously didn't have it. We're extending this to any developer on the planet by using tools we are all familiar with: REST and Javascript. And since the whole internet wants to interact with visualization we're doing it at a new level of scale.
Happy to talk through the details with you, my email address is in my profile--just ping me and we can schedule some time!
What infrastructure? Some cloud BI solutions let you drop an iframe to integrate and done. Same is true for the rest apis.
Still not seeing the differentiation, however I honestly wish you success. Congrats.
Congratulations on the launch.
Data visualization is about multi-gig, possibly streaming data sets, and crucially, parsing the data, probably in real time, for the crucial 1-2% of it that's actually interesting, and helping user find them. Not putting a thin SASS wrapper on stone age graphics whose underlying data size is probably measured in kilobytes
This thing looks like a charting service. Not "data visualization".