

Chart Your Growth With Chart.io (YC S10) - daniel_levine
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/23/chart-io/#comments

======
acgourley
Speaking as someone who's had to write these kinds of tools internally it's
nice to see more offerings in this space.

That said, I think there is a reason all the players in the space gravitate to
very expensive enterprise level offerings - it's the only place they can
create real value.

Analytics is hard. It either requires a lot of smart code rolling up large
amounts of data into manageable pieces, or a very big piece of iron that can
deal with somewhat raw data. And in either case, everyone has their data in a
different format in a different database on a different OS. The result is that
you need a behemoth piece of enterprise software or a custom written solution.

Even if you build a really smart UI that lets you quickly build reports that
slice and dice you data, one dimension is too large to quickly process, or the
ID's in another set don't quite line up. Something. There is always a problem
that comes up that makes those canned demo videos look comical.

The best tool I've used where I felt it was both easy to use and powerful is
Tableau. But, the price tag ended up being a little too high to swallow.

Note that one space I see that is under served is outward facing dashboards.
If you're an advertising company and you want to show the results of the
campaign you ran for a client, you have to send them an excel file or write
your own custom dashboard. A server that manages authentication, data
versioning, chart presentation, regular email updates, browser compatability,
etc. is adding a lot of value. GoodData is working on this problem, and I
think they are on to something. The concept has a viral quality, as well, as
every client they sign up exposes their technology to all that client's
clients.

~~~
daniel_levine
Tableau is an amazing piece of software but we agree about the price tag. We
envision ourselves being Tableau on the web and eventually supporting native
connections to Data APIs and then Intelligence.

It's a long road but you have to aim high.

------
buro9
This is really good. Simple perhaps, but I'm guessing it's just early.

When I'm done with my MSc project you guys should take a look. It loads in
near real-time (within seconds of a change) SharePoint data into a SQL
database in a form that allows for the differently structured data to be
reported on. It's only a few weeks away from being written up but I'm going to
be putting the code out there for anyone to use once it's done.

Anyhow an issue that you're going to have is data storage.

Ignoring the fact that enterprises will be very reticent to letting you have
data, SMEs in Europe are going to be very reticent to let that data leave the
legal boundary of Europe. There are lots of good laws in Europe that protects
data so long as it's kept in Europe.

You should look at putting in place something that allows you to offer Europe
only hosting of the data to counter that, a silo for a major legal domain.

That's the big problem I see, but in your favour not all companies will think
of it (though enough will).

Another question I would have is: Storage is cheap but ongoing cloud storage
is still expensive (relative to buying a couple of hard drives and a cheap
machine vs you holding the data for a couple of years). Have you not thought
of just offering the charting as a product companies can install locally? This
also solves the legal boundary problem of data protection.

Also you should think of adding KPI charts that can be embedded into Word and
PowerPoint docs. Little smart widget things that go and get the chart data
from you as it changes.

~~~
daniel_levine
We will definitely add the ability to embed charts. It is all done in
javascript which means it can be viewed pretty much everywhere.

We are looking into a Firewall version much like Github has for big
businesses, but we really want to build the product with the small and medium
business in mind.

Definitely stay tuned as we iterate. There is a lot more to come!

~~~
buro9
Cool. If you want any pointers let me know. I've basically built this twice
before for medium and large enterprises. Unfortunately the company I worked
for didn't appreciate fully the general applicability of the product (they
thought it only solved project management problems, only 1 of our customers
fully understood it solved nearly all of their "first 80%" reporting needs),
but it did allow data to be fetched from multiple backends (Excel, MySQL, SQL
Server, Oracle, etc) and to be fed into one database that added snapshots over
time (configurable granularity from 1 day up to anything).

To companies that had trouble getting their data together the sale was always
easy as they appreciated the problem. But most didn't appreciate that problem
so it's hard to sell on that basis.

The real value and the whizz-bang that sold it to most companies was how I
presented the charts. I used SharePoint to create chart blocks, and these
could be connected to other charts via a very simple connection framework.

Example: Drag one chart onto the page, configure it to look at some data. Drag
another chart onto the page and configure it to look at some other data. Drag
a filter onto the page and connect Chart A to Chart B via the filter and
specify that Chart B's data is restricted to the selected series in Chart A.

What you then get is a multi-level drill-down and sets of building blocks that
allow you to build any dashboard you want and to have pages that show really
rich related charts.

Unfortunately the company I worked for only ever considered this as a project
management solution even though it worked for all structured data from any
source.

My latest toy (in my spare time) is how to do the same thing for semi-
structured data and data that may be structured but not consistently. This is
just because what I saw as constraints to reporting within larger companies
wasn't the lack of data, but the lack of common edges that could power
reporting.

Anyhow, I'll open source my work on SharePoint in a month or so, feel free to
use whatever you need. It shows how to fetch data from multiple SharePoint
systems in an eventual consistent way. And it also allows for storing data
from multiple tables in the same few tables whatever the structure whilst
being extremely efficient at aggregated reporting queries.

~~~
daniel_levine
very cool stuff. I'm always interested in hearing about more people in the
analytics space

~~~
buro9
Because I'm going to forget the points I'm thinking this morning remind me to
talk about this stuff when we speak in a month or so time:

\1 Don't just copy their tables and expect them to navigate the front-end,
store data in a way that relates to how they work with the data (if it says
"Risks" in their UI, then they expect to see a 'table' called Risks in their
reporting) and it's often much better to de-normalise lots of inputs into the
one way that reflects how they think about the data.

\2 Don't try and understand their data or to apply any surprises to the data.
It must be predictable. Most people don't comprehend stats properly and if you
aggregate or do anything that they cannot compare to their raw data and
immediately comprehend then they reject the chart/report. It's been more
successful and easier to chart dumb data in a predictable way than it is to
try and understand the data and chart it in an intelligent way. Leave domain
specific problems unless that domain is lucrative enough and you know it well
enough (risk management fits in here).

\3 Storage of data is interesting. Storing snapshots gives trends and trends
are valuable, on the other hand storing snapshots is expensive (multiple
copies of data) and so a delta is preferred, but deltas are expensive.
Alternatively, for low maturity and 'free' accounts your could just do 'Now'
data and nothing else as it has the lowest storage and processing
requirements.

\4 Most business data is still in Excel within the SME world. Tech startups
aside (where most stuff is in databases and Google Docs), just cleaning up the
Excel so that it's usable is fun on it's own.

\5 Whilst everyone knows you can't chart TEXT fields, good reporting leads to
the asking of more questions as one question begets another. Eventually this
leads to root cause analysis and drilling down to the few exceptions. When
they finally get down to knowing the n items that are the cause they really do
want to see that full data in the one place (the reports). Unfortunately this
means cleaning text as you wouldn't believe the weird and wonderful ways that
people find to enter text (if it can be written in PowerPoint, pasted into
Word and copied into whatever datastore that they are using - it will be).

\6 Relationships between data. The more these can be understood the better.
Most places aren't good at this, tools which can analyse even just the names
of fields and suggest possible relationships are good things. Using these
relationships to build filters and drill-downs is really cool stuff that sells
it easy.

\7 Tufte. Go read everything and excel at producing the cleanest and easiest
to read diagrams and charts. _Everyone_ wants their presentation to look cool,
everyone wants to look at a sexy dashboard and understand the problem... the
whole world is tired of Excel charting, but Google charting is also ugly...
make the charts pretty as this the bit the user sees most of the time and is
what they will most readily pay for.

Those are more talking points... an immediate brain dump. I'll try and give
you a more structured brain dump in a month or so.

There are only a few key problems:

1) Aggregating multiple stores of data to create the high level reports.

2) Relationships between data.

3) Deciding on how to store stuff so you can trend.

4) Making it look good.

~~~
achompas
Brilliant post. I work with data at my 9-5 and a lot of this applies to me as
well.

You need like another 10-15 votes to match how great this was.

------
cpg
Damn, we have been looking for something like this for so long. I even posted
an Ask HN question about precisely this a little while ago
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1393159>). In the end, we keep stats
nightly and export them to excel. Yeah, re-creating the graphs every time is
what kills it. So we export a limited version to Roambi.

The issue is that Roambi (strangely) can simulate and such in flash, but only
output to iphone/ipad. Granted, it's a gorgeus interface.

Now, I may be a bit old fashioned, but handing our database out is something
that makes me very nervous and opens us up for liabilities if something were
to happen.

So tempting, though ...

One possible idea would be to somehow derive a cooked version of our DB and
use that. Not sure how to do it nicely.

Another option is to somehow license this as a gem or something?

This is exactly what we need for many needs and perhaps all needs if you
actually managed to abstract all the needs in a general way.

~~~
daniel_levine
Glad we can help you out! We take what we do seriously and we're like
consultants under tight NDA. We'll connect to your data securely and never
share it with anyone.

Large banks, tel cos and credit card companies hire consultants all the time.
Plue we'll be so useful!

------
Feeble
Seems really nifty, but I have two questions;

Does this require that your servers get access to our internal databases, i.e.
do we have to expose our databases externally? Secondly, will you store none,
any or all the data that you fetch locally at your servers? Temporary or
infinitely?

I didn't find this information explicitly somewhere, so I thought I would ask.

~~~
daniel_levine
Yes. We can securely connect via SSL and we're working on SSH tunneling. We
recommend a db slave if possible.

We can also take nightly dumps to our servers right now.

We store metadata about your databases in order to provide a richer experience
and we might eventually set up local caching but if we're remotely connecting
we will not store any of your business data and we really don't want to.

------
kyro
Are you, or any of the other recent yc sites I've seen lately, finding Olark
to be useful? Do you find that users are indeed using it to seek assistance?

~~~
rgrieselhuber
Olark is amazing. Because I have customers all over the world, but only an
English site, it lets me interact with people who don't fully understand what
they are reading.

It really helps with my Japanese customers because we can communicate in their
language and I can guide them through the registration process. In the 4 days
since launching, I've had dozens of people interact with me on it.

------
danielbru
Congrats, Levine and Dave!

------
jaxn
I have a couple of retail stores. I have them push data into Google AppEngine
nightly and have been using a Google Spreadsheet for the "dashboard". It is
super cool that Chart.io is supporting AppEngine as a data source.

I have high hopes. I just wish I had checked this out sooner so that I was
ahead of the TechCrunch rush in the beta account line.

------
achompas
Love the website. Had this idea a few weeks ago but I don't know how to print
"Hello, world" in JS. Glad you guys have done such a great job with it.

One thing to note: I Google "chart.io" and the first hit is "www.chart.io,"
which is apparently broken.

------
klochner
At first glance this looks like a great bridge between engineering and
marketing/ops/biz-dev: I can pull all these stats pretty easily from the
console, but would much prefer if I weren't part of the process.

~~~
daniel_levine
we're big believers in that having both been the people who didn't want to be
a part of the process :)

------
chime
Does it support ODBC? I would love to pay for a local install that lets my
users query a MS Navision database. I would pay the same as equivalent Tableau
licenses.

