Verifiable.com is closing up shop, handing another bullet to those ammunition-hoarders who think cloud services are a constant trap for taking your data and info with no real requirements. Fighting in a space full of names like Tableau and IBM ManyEyes, visualization as a service is proving to be a difficult market to break. Robert Kosara takes a look at what happened to Verifiable, and provides some tips on how the next startup may fare better.
As much as I hate to admit it, I think all visualization websites fail on point one. People don’t feel a need to visualize data, we have to make them aware that visualization even exists, and that it can do something for them. The vast number of pretty but useless pictures on the web that are all called visualizations doesn’t exactly help.
The few people who do want to visualize their data and are looking for this kind of service are most likely not interested in visualization web sites the way they exist today. Those people are mostly dealing with very valuable proprietary data that they don’t want to (or aren’t allowed to, per corporate policy) upload to a third party’s web service.
Personally. I think the proprietary data issue is the biggest one. People with interesting data worth visualizing typically are very protective and possessive of it. Not to mention, it can be rather large (I wouldn’t want to upload some of my datasets to a cloud server, 10 gigabytes takes a while).
