Sramana Mitra: The problem with technology companies developing tools for the media, especially for whom you call data journalists, is that they just don’t pay. Stew Langille: I agree. We found that as well. We came from Mint.com. When I was creating data warehouses, I also ran the marketing team. We took a similar approach
Sramana Mitra: I am surprised and also happy that you mentioned those names. How is it that you are suggesting that Tableau is not in the visualization field? There are [data] visualizations there. Stew Langille: They are. But [that type of] visualization is really an explanatory and an analysis tool. Visualization is an output that
Sramana Mitra: According to you, you are operating at the very end of the big data spectrum. There are infrastructure players that provide the infrastructure for big data to be processed and researched. Then there are the applications that provide the domain knowledge and the logic based on such data. You provide the presentation layer
Sramana Mitra: What I have understood is that the members of your user community belong to various categories. You talked about data scientists, bloggers, business users, and so on. Help me to understand where your real business is. Who are the paying customers? Stew Langille: The platform is driven by the community. That is why
Stew Langille is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Visual.ly. Previously Stew was director of marketing at Mint.com, where he built that company’s data business. He is a pioneer in the use of data as a marketing vehicle for both publishers and brands. In this interview Stew talks about how Visual.ly applies big data