At Datasmoothie we’ve been hard at work building what we sometimes refer to as “the Medium.com for data”. In essence, Datasmoothie allows you to hook raw data into our servers (via an upload or a direct database connection) and then gives you access to an easy to use editor to create beautiful stories, reports and dashboards with aggregated results that have been automatically calculated for you.
One of our a-ha moments is when someone has uploaded a data file that might be a long list of answers to questions like “do you think the advertisement was funny?” and they realise they can add visualisations into a report at the click of a mouse.
When the user clicks on the chart button in our report editor she is presented by a list of questions, each reflecting a column (often called variable) in the data, where each column represents a data point. Here the column represents an answer to “was the ad funny” where people have answered form a scale to 1-5 according to how strongly they agree.
Sharing this kind of result with clients used to be a matter of labourious copy and pasting into Excel, Word and Powerpoint. And even then a recipient would have to wait until they got to their desk in order to view a report. Datasmoothie removes the need for all that copy and paste work on the production end and allows a user to view the results on a mobile on the receiver’s end.