Today, you will find 900 billion charts offline but only 40 million charts online. Because of that, iCharts believes it currently must be too difficult to bring charts online. So it has developed an easy way to create, share, and embed interactive charts.
The self-proclaimed “YouTube for interactive charts,” iChart provides a way for users to take data they created with other services like Excel or Google Spreadsheets, and upload that data directly to iCharts. Once collected, users need only to drag and drop the data to the chart to create a fully-modifiable and interactive chart.
The startup presented today at TechCrunch50 during the Finance and Statistics session. You can watch a video of its presentation here.
At the bottom of every iChart, controls let users modify the view and change the data series. In addition to being able to zoom into a data range and highlight the most relevant data, users can upload audio files that they record to accompany the chart.
Like most of the other services announced at TechCrunch50, iCharts offers a widget that will let users place the chart anywhere online and can even be embedded into Powerpoint presentations, PDF files, and anything that’s capable of handling Flash content.
Most importantly, iCharts can be published and shared with anyone visiting the site and are automatically optimized so web surfers find them as images in search.
iCharts launches today and is already populated with a slew of charts that are freely available for reuse.
Expert Panelists
Roleof Botha:
I think it’s a very interesting idea because I spend too much time using Excel. I’m not sure how the business model will play out, but there’s a lot of value in communicating effectively. I’m very intrigued.
Don Dodge:
“I like it a lot and anytime you make something simple and easy, you have a winner. And you have a winner here. I assume that you make metadata available to search engines, which is huge and that alone is a big advance. I like everything about it. I’m a little concerned about the business model, but I love it.”
Kevin Rose:
“I’d spend some time designing the charts and hiring a “kick ass” designer. What do you think about the Google Charts API?”
Answer: First off, the business model isn’t quite complete in our thoughts yet. We think we have a lot of revenue streams available, but one key area will be advertising.
Mark Cuban:
“You have the easiest business model of everyone. Rather than being YouTube, you should license this great product to companies that don’t want to recreate the products and would rather you do it. Tell the companies that they can either spend time and money doing charts themselves or pay you for what you do best. Don’t follow the heroes, just follow the money.”
Kevin Rose:
“The only thing that worries me is that you’re competing with the Google API which is really nice.”
Answer: I don’t think we’re competing, we can be the company that you come to after using other services. I think they can all be partners and not competitors.
Mark Cuban:
“Google API won’t customize to customer needs so you won’t need to worry about the others.”
Why bother when the site is locked down…?
Answer: First off, the business model isn’t quite complete in our thoughts yet. We think we have a lot of revenue streams available, but one key area will be advertising.
why was this company invited to tech crunch 50 with an answer like this
Agreed. How can you, on one of the biggest days in your startup’s history, not have at least some kind of marketing material on your Web site? As someone that is in analytics and business intelligence I’d love to see some kind of example of their service/product. Oh well.
If Mark Cuban says there is a business here, you don’t need any further validation.
Regards,
George
I wonder how this differs from Swivel.com (which also has a YouTube/Flickr model)
(plug: We’ll be rolling a similar service soon (http://timepedia.org), which is more of a “Wikipedia” for charts and analytics)
and how will TimePedia differ from IBM’s Many Eyes?
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.....orial.html
Thank you for your comments.
We will be launching the portal in less than 48 hours. We are already in beta with a number of users and a corporate customer. We could not, however, make the site ready for launch for the presentation. Please bear with us.
We have received a lot of positive responses from TC50 (at the conference and via emails) and thanks for all the support.
Best,
Raj
co-founder and Board Member,
iCharts, Inc.
Raj,
Don’t let the people here give you too much shit. I know the value prop is different to FusionCharts (it appears you’re offering a fully hosted model), but I like the idea of having kick-ass charts we could utilise in our application. We’re already FusionCharts users, so it would have to have a comparatively easy rendering language.
Looking forward to the launch and access to a Beta.
Geoff
Geoff,
Taking off my “pimp my own stuff” hat for a second, I’m curious what you’d like to see in a rendering language. We went the route of allowing people to use CSS to allow people to make our chart look like any other chart, rather than having to write Javascript or XML (which you can also do). Do you find CSS syntax easier than XML or Javascript for specifying charts?
Another thing we allow is specifying the input data as simple HTML tables with microformats, so for those who don’t know how to program, you just put your data in a table, add some CSS classes, and the widget code turns it into a chart.
Is this what you mean by easy rendering langauge, or do you mean something else? I’m interested in improving what we have and making it even easier, some potential options might be bookmarklets.
“why was this company invited to tech crunch 50 with an answer like this”
An open mindset can be an advantage. Branding and monetization are easier than implementing a good idea well.
Besides if they got up and said ‘its advertising all the way!” then Cuban would have had to correct them instead of suggesting a course…thats part of the point of the conference too IMHO.
Hey, that video link goes to Me-trics, not iCharts.
Dumb… might as well give me a 404 error.
Try this http://www.visifire.com/silver.....signer.php
It is online Chart Designer.
One can create some cool Silverlight charts online with in minutes. Charts can be embedded in web pages.
What bothers me the most about iCharts is that Adobe Flex, the system used to write iCharts, has a component called Flex Charting, which provides a rich library with which to create charts of all sorts with great customization and data provider opportunities.
All the folks at iCharts seem to have done is to write an extremely thin front-end to the already existing Charting components. In some of their examples it seems they didn’t even bother to change the default colors. If I understand it correctly, an experienced Flex developer could fully reproduce their technology in well under a month.
This really nullifies Mark Cuban’s suggestion that iCharts should sell their charting technology to other companies rather than marketing it as a consumer solution, since the Charting components are already a part of Flex, feature-rich, and easy to use.
Arash, I’ve noticed this about quite a few Flash charts out there. I guess they could still sell the hosting service, but Swivel has been trying to do this for the last year or so, and it’s a hard sell.
On the other hand, I think history has shown that you can take something, repackage it, and sell it with a few superficial changes, and get the public to buy, so they may yet be a success.
Ray,
Thank you for your comments.
Just a quick note - we already have a customer Springer Science and Business Media which is our launch customer. Springer is the second largest scientific publisher in the world - providing some validation for our model.
More to come.
Thanks again.
Best,
Rajesh
co-founder and Board Member
iCharts, Inc.
If they really developed interfaces to Excel (2003, 2007?) and have a dynamic interface to Google Speadsheets (i.e. don’t just ask users to convert to static CSV files on their local PC) there may have been some work in this.
Plus, Arash, a call interface from ActionScript is probably not what spreadsheet users want for their charts.
(PS Can’t watch the video of the demo for some reason)
Arash,
Thank you for your comments.
Of course, we have made the most out of what charting features are already available in Flex. The availability of rich charting functionality played a major part in choosing that technology in the first place.
As you will see, we have built new functionality and extended existing charting functionality - to make it easy for everyone to create and publish charts.
Thanks again.
Best,
Rajesh
co-founder and Board Member
iCharts, Inc.
It would be great if the charts would be customizable more than just colors, for example trees instead of plain bars, or images of a real pie, for pie charts. Then you can make really popular charts IMHO. Colors are important too. Also what would be great is if it could be embedded also in MS Word, because that is still the major doc format in the business world. Oh yes, if I have a rather large Excel (for example: 50 entries) can iCharts still work with it (for example in a plot or so). How about animations in between the charts - I have heard Adobe Flash can do that. Great job you guys!
This is a stupid idea, why use a company like this when a junior developer can create the same charts for your company.
Perry,
One more way to look at it is to say “This is a cool idea.. now I don’t have to hire developers to create my charts”
Cheers,
Rajesh
co-founder and Board Member
iCharts, Inc.
These type of services might make it easier to visualize data quickly, but I am afraid that producing beautiful minimalist presentation slides that really, really drive home a quantitative message will remain manual work for some time to come.
I like what I see, but don’t see a major value add.
I recently started exploring http://www.youcalc.com, which allows you to slurp and mash data from all kinds of APIs, calculate on it, and visualize it real-time in interactive chart widgets - that to me looks more like a winner.
Roger
?
Yeah, there are loads of free charting out there. When it comes to forex or stock charts, everyone is using zedgraph. I see it everywhere I go. As late as today I stubled upon a finace site forexcot.com having forex cot charts, and I bet they are using it. As I said - it is used everywhere.
/J_H