Broker: A fast data visualization platform | Hacker News Reader

Broker: A fast data visualization platform

broker.is

22 pointsnicksergeant9 comments

Some feedback on the site (is it yours?): the home page is disappointing because the it doesn't say anything. I'm interested in this space (e.g. crossfilter/pourover) but this provides no information to contrast against those, so the call to action doesn't work on me even though I might be your target market.

The first few examples given are displaying really small sets of data -- e.g. realty and showroom are each displaying ~500 data points, which is small enough that a straightforward JavaScript loop that filters by checking each datum would be "ridiculously fast".

I'm not sure your description is accurate. When I think visualization platform, I think of something like D3 or raphael.

Agreed. Maybe something like "Ridiculously fast local faceted search" would be more appropriate?

I looked at this with interest, and it's just a showcase page with a "contact us" button. I don't click on showcases, I click on documentation, getting started, and pricing links.

Yes. Things like a showcase page, an email-signup page, or a fundraising page are often not very substantive. The best kind of product post is a Show HN pointing to something people can play with. The second best is a detailed description of the product and technology.

Because HN generally doesn't allow reposts for about a year, it's not usually in one's interest to post about a product too early. It's better, for both the product and for the community, to wait until something is ready for the sweet spot of HN.

When I think fast, I think being able to rendering hundreds of thousands of data points in real time, kind of like 'Google Maps' but for Time instead of Space, you should be able to fly over and analyze vast datasets.

As a historical note, since this is an area near and dear to my heart, I shipped an open source library several years ago circa 2007 that attempted to do this by applying the 3D graphics concept of a "mip map" to time series, with several representations of the data at various LOD automatically computed by sampling and filtering. I demoed it at Google I/O 2008 rendering 1 million data points in real time. Location here: https://code.google.com/p/gwt-chronoscope/, it's written in Java using GWT, and also the same code runs on the server for Java2D rasterization, and on Android. It has a JS API and Microformat API as well.

Here's a screencast of it in action, including things like animation, markers, synthetic datasets (technical analysis), styling, and history undo/redo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLYNHQVIeNg

I eventually wanted to get to a point where people could collaborately analyze data and tell stories about it. This screencast shows "Timelord" which was a integrated with social networks and supported a concept called "Micro-presentations", using a markdown-like format to allow people to write animated two-way video/chart synchronized stories. In this video, Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" is synchronized to a Chart of CO2 and Temperature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5Y21t0u_Zw

I don't mind links to cool commercial services, but not having a pricing page means I close the tab and move on.

At the very least, some sort of comment on HN giving a pricing ballpark would be helpful.

Is it a crime to not have a pricing model, yet?

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Obviously we'll build a UI around this at some point.

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