Amazing demo reel of Palantir visualization UI | Hacker News Reader

Amazing demo reel of Palantir visualization UI

blog.palantirtech.com

29 pointsregs20 comments

Palantir has done some amazing work building high quality, meaningful visualizations backed by big data. Really neat stuff, all in Java Swing!

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Maybe this demo reel makes sense to their target customers, but it made very little sense to me. Not sure if it really tells a story to members of the general population.

Also, I personally felt that the "eye candy" wasn't so impressive. Looked like any other ERP/B2B system out there. Aside from the criminal clip art and the maps, it might as well have been.

Music was grating after 30 seconds as well.

Still dig the company name though.

This demo reel was culled from our myriad online workflow demos. You can find them linked off of our main website or directly on the two analysis blogs:

http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog http://www.palantirfinance.com/analysis-blog/

or from the pfinance splash reel:

http://www.palantirfinance.com/

Seen as part of the demos they were pulled from, it will make more sense.

I liked it OK, but strongly suggest you either use a player with a volume control or process the volume on the music before you make the flash, especially if you're going to use dance music that stays pinned in the red :)

The key points about the visualizations are twofold:

- They're good, interactive, snappy, and compelling. - They're general purpose tools backed by real data, where the data is application specific, not the tools.

There are a bunch of these kinds systems in the government. Palantir's tech is pretty cool and a nice spin on the area (besides looking nice and slick). But hardly new.

It takes a lot of cues from mish-mash systems like this one (warning PDF)

http://www.cjmtk.com/EventRegistration/CjmtkConf08/DCGS-A_MF... (a hodge podge of every conceivable analysis tool and database under the Intelligence sun)

And more unified systems like this

http://www.futurepointsystems.com/ (their page stinks but their tech is awesomely cool)

and other single purpose tools like

http://www.i2inc.com/products/analysts_notebook/ (industry standard link-analysis)

http://tactical.overwatch.com/products/axis_pro.htm (another recent link-analysis tool)

http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/ (the name in geospatial)

And others http://spotfire.tibco.com/

http://www.oculusinfo.com/SoftwareProducts/GeoTime.html

It's nice that they are expanding out into financial services and geospatial analysis. Up till now it's largely been a glorified (and very expensive) link-analysis tool (see i2's and overwatch's tools).

The streaming didn't work at all for me. You can download it directly here:

http://media.palantirtech.com/palantir_demo_reel_final.mp4

Yeah, I apologize that the flash player is a little fickle. The direct link is a great way to get at it, too. Thanks for posting that.

I can't believe this was written in Swing

Visualizations like that are one of the few things swing is awesome at.

Swing is a bit over-engineered, which makes it a somewhat cumbersome for simple projects but I'm not at all surprised it proves to be powerful in large ones.

I've seen these guys come up a few times over the years, and I think what they're doing is amazing. When I watched that video, I didn't just think "Wow, this is something cool" it was more of "I want to be involved with this". Working on the kind of stuff shown off in that video was just about as close to my dream job as I have ever seen.

On that note, I wanted to point out one screenshot in particularly, which just blew me away: http://blog.palantirtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/hh-d.... That has got to be one of the slickest, best looking interfaces I have ever seen. Some of the contrast is a little bad from a color-blind perspective (the titles for the widgets are very difficult to read), but the way they jammed so much information into a screenfull is amazing.

We're hiring: http://www.palantirtech.com/careers/positions

We'd love to have as much help as we can get!

I got one of their free schwag shirts. It says, "You had me at hello world"

I got one that says "Save the Shire" and I have no idea why.

(They're named palantir, after the crystal balls in Lord of the Rings... so hence that shirt)

I also have the shirts too. Good addition to the collection.

Seems to be only good for presenting data, not interacting with it really.

I didn't know music this bad existed. WHY would you use it in a demo real?

You don’t know Daft Punk? Have you been living under a rock?

aw, c'mon, and I was thinking since when did Daft Punk == pounding music? Maybe I'm not that old after all...

[Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtdWHFwmd2o&feature=fvw]

Human After All IMHO is probably the worst Daft Punk album Bangalter and Homem-Christo put together. Technologic is one of, if not the worst song on the entire album.

Terrible.

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