Going Public Beta Today
Hi Everyone,
Visible Certainty is going public beta today. This has been a long trip and might be worth visiting the history of how we got here.
First Jason and I spent from 1998 to 2006 trying to get to a Tufte conference. We were fascinated by the premise of a better way to communicate data, but we were also pretty busy. The first time we talked about it we were busy working on the software for a company called Gamesville. Jason’s friend Peter had heard Tufte speak and was bowled over by it. He even produced a “Tufte Presentation” at one of his own conferences and got rave reviews about it. So we were intrigued. But, two companies later (GameLogic, QuantumFoam) and we were still procrastinating. Finally the planets aligned and Tufte was in Boston and we were between companies trying to decide what the new new new thing would be.
It was riveting. It was a moment of clarity. When Tufte told that story of Galileo discovering actual scientific evidence that the earth revolved around the sun and termed it “visible certainty” we were sold. Even better that the Catholic Church told him never use those words again. Better yet, Tufte was complaining that no one had ever put together the right tool to produce elegant, simple, data-dense presentations in a single package. A quick dotster search showed that visiblecertainty.com was available so for $9.95 we started a new company. Okay maybe a little more for computers, lawyers, office space, employees, software, and some other stuff but that initial $9.95 was the important thing.
Ahhh… but how to start.
You really have to do a lot of reading about stuff that is way above my pay grade.
First there were the four Tufte books. Then the Grammar of Graphics by Wilkinson for ideas for how to boil a software design out of a visualization. Then there are Cleveland’s Visualizing Data, and The Elements of Graphing Data, which is really about the guts of the statistical ideas behind the visualizations. And finally Stephen Few’s Show Me The Numbers. You may notice that when you choose chart types in our tool they are broken down into his groupings. Few really seems to have struck a wonderful balance between elegance and daily effectiveness.
Now what technology to use? Jason and I had become huge fans of Ruby, Rails, EC2, and S3 over the last year or so (but don’t get me started on some of the scaling issues we are running into or EC2 down time). So that was a place to start. We did our time with gruff, ImageMagick, rmagick, rgplot, R, and ChartDirector.
Thank god we hired Kris in October of that year because in early December after banging our heads on the code for another month or so, he mentioned that Flex 3 was supposed to have fixed the configuration, scaling, development environment, and language issues that made us all hate/fear it before. So Jason and I discussed it, decided it was best to pretend it was our idea, pushed off our December release and moved the chart and data set generation to Flash. JD came on in January just in time to be tortured by this decision. He managed to solve all the things that overwhelmed the rest of us (including changing a O(n^2) “feature” to O(1) in the off-the-shelf data transport code we were using). Then about two weeks ago, Peter (remember him from the beginning of this story) agreed to join up - after all he was REALLY to blame for the whole thing.
And sixteen months later, with employees in three time zones, here we are! At least we didn’t have to name it Visible Certainty 2008 to release ;-)
Next stop: data joins and small multiples!
Hope you all enjoy the tool,
Stuart
