As mentioned earlier, we wanted to give our readers a chance to get to know our TOC Startup Showcase Finalists a little bit better before the big showdown in NYC. We’re featuring the startups with a personality profile here on our website.
Our next profile is from Jacek Grebski of CartoDB.
I’m really good at …
Creating beautiful data driven stories through maps and visualization.
What is the first thing that people notice about you?
Our background stems from biodiversity conservation, and the projects that we work on are those that tell stories which matter. These are conservation of endangered species, deforestation issues, and other similar projects that have a positive impact on our planet.
The three things your friends say you are…
Innovative: We’re always trying to push the bar forward in terms of spatial data visualization and storytelling.
Easy: For anyone in journalism who’s had to work with data driven visualizations before, CartoDB is a godsend.
Great looking: We like to make maps and visualizations beautiful and we are great at it.
What are your three BEST life skills?
We make it easier than ever to tell stories with data.
We work on all mobile devices so those stories can live on the web and mobile.
We scale. We can render 10 points or 100 million points, and can handle 10 visits or 10 million visits a day.
What are you most passionate about?
Visualizing large and complex data sets has never been easy, and being able to tell compelling stories through those visualizations is an art form all within itself. At CartoDB we’re trying to make this process as simple and intuitive as possible without having to know a considerable amount of code.
What is the one thing that people don’t notice about you right away that you wish they would?
In many ways CartoDB is a blank canvas that allows you to create a wide variety of visualizations, it can be used for storytelling, or to build mobile applications, or run complex geospatial analysis.
While we work with many sectors and have made it easier than before to dive into CartoDB’s functionality, we’d love for people to log in and have that Eureka! moment the first time they use the platform and see its complete value from the onset.
Your best (and most sincere) VC pickup line reduced to the length of a tweet…
Making beautiful dynamic maps is complicated, we make it easy by providing a scalable cloud powered geospatial database, an analysis interface and a visualization engine.
Complete this phrase: Valentine’s Day is for _______________.
Valentine’s Day is for you and your loved one to try CartoDB.