Silk 1.5

Publish data online and create interactive visualizations

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These guys are shipping some Major updates to their product today. There are a lot of cool data visualisations made with Silk. Like "FDA Recalled Products" and "Expensive things". Maybe my buddy @Salar (founder) can answer some Q's!)
@bramk Thanks Bram! We're very excited about our update and the new product page. More on Silk and the latest changes on our blog: Some others Silks that the Product Hunt community might enjoy: Headphone Product Guide: Y Combinator Startups: Value of Seed Incubators: http://seed-startups-and-incubat... Women in Software: Happy to answer any questions here!
Cool product! How does this compare to more "heavyweight" visualization platforms like Tableau and Tibco Spotfire?
@andrewrlin Love this product. Basically I view it as "Tableau for the masses". Enormous potential to become the consumer's data/viz solution of choice. Also, @salar has an impressive vision.
@andrewrlin I think it's the data publishing aspect that makes Silk unique: we allow you to publish your data online without losing any fidelity. So you can keep playing with the data, change views, apply filters, etc. instead of creating one-off visualizations. Think of it in this way: if you actually want to get a dataset online today, what options do you have except sharing a Google Sheet (which isn't a great presentation tool)? Visualizations tools like Tableau are great, but you wouldn't use them to build something like an overview of headphones or YC startups (see my links at the top).
@bastiaanjanmaat Thanks Bastiaan! :-)
@salar Love it! Reduce the friction for data analysis and data visualization. I asked because there seems to be still a large gap between someone putting data in an Excel spreadsheet and copying a graph over to another medium, both not scaleable and not sustainable, and the use of more "heavyweight" data visualization software which require thick clients built around huge data sets. Sounds like Silk is not only meeting that need in the middle, but expanding the offerings so that it is more accessible to the masses (re: @bastiaanjanmaat 's comment). I'd love to see more use cases. Just curious, from a vision perspective, I could very easily see integrations both upstream and downstream in terms of data publishing and consumption: e.g. piping dynamic data into built visualizations, data aggregation, integration with data consumption mechanisms like purchasing and CRM tools. Do you see Silk expanding in any of these areas?
@andrewrlin @bastiaanjanmaat Yes, you clearly get it! Short term, our plan is to make it easier to get data in to Silk (stay tuned in the next few weeks by following us on Twitter – @silkdotco). Longer-term, we know that we won't be able to cover all the things you mention, even with a larger team. So we're taking a platform approach to this, allowing other to integrate and build on top of Silks, or add widgets as plugins. This is why we don't see visualization tools as competitors: we'd happily integrate with them so that they can visualize data from Silk. Our goal is to be the common platform for data, not the visuals :-)
I'm a big fan of Silk and using it for several collections I will be soon sharing.
I am very excited about this...