{"id":307652,"date":"2010-02-11T13:25:30","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T18:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xconomy.com\/?p=62996"},"modified":"2010-02-11T13:25:30","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T18:25:30","slug":"ceo-christian-chabot-on-tableau-software%e2%80%99s-new-consumer-app-for-making-data-social","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/307652","title":{"rendered":"CEO Christian Chabot on Tableau Software\u2019s New Consumer App for Making Data Social"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
startups<\/a>, Software<\/a>, Data Visualization<\/a><\/div>\n

\t\t\"Tableau<\/a>
\n\t\tGregory T. Huang wrote:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI make the bold claim that this will be of interest to anyone who posts content online,\u201d says Christian Chabot, the co-founder and chief executive of Seattle-based Tableau Software<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We were talking recently about his company\u2019s big move into consumer software, which was just announced today. \u201cThe target is really bloggers, journalists, writers, critics, researchers, students—anyone who wants to put information online,\u201d Chabot said.<\/p>\n

Tableau is focused on data visualization and business intelligence. The company sells its software to businesses and organizations that need powerful tools to dissect large amounts of data and pull out trends and patterns more efficiently. That\u2019s everyone from Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, to three-letter government agencies, to Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the Dallas Cowboys.<\/p>\n

And now the tools are being offered to consumers for free, at TableauPublic.com<\/a>. The move fits with Tableau\u2019s goal of becoming the \u201cAdobe of data.\u201d<\/a> It also seems like a smart move to get the company\u2019s tools in the hands of a much broader audience. \u201cIt\u2019s for the public good, for the public Web, and for public information. If there\u2019s anything mildly private, you\u2019d want to use Tableau\u2019s business product,\u201d Chabot says. \u201cWe think it will flow back to us with exposure. It will expose people to our technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chabot puts data in perspective with the history of digital media on the Internet. \u201cWe\u2019re finally going to make data on the Web as fun and useful as an online video,\u201d he says. \u201cThe history of the Web is it started as a bunch of text, marked up, and then images finally became a first-class citizen, and Flickr exploded. Images are a properly respected object on the Web canvas. Now, thanks to Adobe Flash and YouTube and the Flip camera, video is a first-class citizen. We at Tableau, we\u2019d say there\u2019s only one more type of content that humans produce, and that\u2019s data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Granted, the idea of playing with data seems more abstract and doesn\u2019t have as broad immediate appeal as pictures and video. But Chabot says, \u201cIt needs its Flickr, it needs its Flip camera. Take any dataset. You can do two things—you can tell stories really well, and you can answer people\u2019s questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the key here—Tableau is trying to make data social and easy. \u201cThe real breakthrough here isn\u2019t that you couldn\u2019t have gotten to this destination,\u201d Chabot says. \u201cIt\u2019s not that we invented interactive visualization. It\u2019s the ability to do it fast without any programming, and do it free and bring it to the whole world.\u201d (That\u2019s as opposed to hiring a team of Flash developers that might take $50,000 and 30 days to produce a high-end interactive visualization for CNN, say.)<\/p>\n

Tableau is one of the fastest growing software companies in the country. It currently has 105 employees and is actively hiring in areas like software development, quality assurance, operations, and sales. Chabot says the company has had record sales the past two quarters, after a bit of a slowdown in early 2009. Tableau has roughly 6,000 business-level customer organizations. \u201cWe\u2019re adding thousands every six months,\u201d Chabot says.<\/p>\n

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startups, Software, Data Visualization Gregory T. Huang wrote: \u201cI make the bold claim that this will be of interest to anyone who posts content online,\u201d says Christian Chabot, the co-founder and chief executive of Seattle-based Tableau Software. We were talking recently about his company\u2019s big move into consumer software, which was just announced today. \u201cThe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-news","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}