VizHub is Launching
Who am I?
My name is Curran Kelleher. I’ve been in the field of data visualization for over 14 years. After graduating from University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2014 with my Ph. D. in Computer Science, I spent one year at Alpine Data Labs, a Big Data Analytics startup in San Francisco (since acquired by Tibco). In 2016 I founded my own consulting company Datavis Tech INC and have been doing remote data visualization and software engineering work since then. I have also been teaching Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s annual online graduate course in data visualization for the past three years. I currently live in India with my wife and daughter.
This is my idea.
Everyone with an Internet connection should be able to learn how to write code and visualize data. I am building a platform called VizHub to make this a reality. Using VizHub, people can study data visualizations, read the code that creates them, and edit the code to create their own novel works. I’ve been working on VizHub since June 2018. I have used VizHub in my WPI online data visualization course for the past two years. It’s the platform I use to produce lecture videos, and also the platform that students use to do their assignments and projects.
The current state of VizHub works well enough to use in the classroom, but not quite well enough to support the large scale education and data visualization production initiatives I envision. VizHub needs to be developed further to make it compelling and useful to professionals already in the field of data visualization. It also needs to be made accessible to those around the world with limited resources in developing countries, such as mobile-only Internet access and limited English language skills.
Professionals in the field need more than a Web-based code editor. They need something that takes full advantage of the Web as a platform for both publishing and collaboration. It should be trivial to embed visualizations from VizHub into any news article or blog post, or to share them on social media. People should be able to collaborate in real-time on private or team-level projects. Deployment to clients and getting feedback should be trivial. These are pain points of currently available tools on the market, widely used by visualization practitioners, that will be addressed by VizHub. These features must be developed to make VizHub a commercial success.
Those around the world with limited resources should also be able to make use of VizHub. The primary use of the platform for these audiences is education. VizHub can be a gateway for people underdeveloped regions to educate themselves about software development and data visualization. Anyone with an Internet connection, a smartphone, and free time can use VizHub to study coding practices, navigate educational video content, and even develop code and visualizations themselves.
Optimizing VizHub for use on mobile devices will make it one of very few tools that actually enables people to develop software on (not for) mobile devices. A visual editor, which will allow users to make edits of numbers and colors by simply dragging their finger across the screen, will make the platform even more accessible. These features of VizHub need to be developed in order for it to make a large impact on educating and uplifting those with limited resources worldwide.
This is how it will benefit society.
The main purpose of VizHub is to enable large scale education and data visualization production initiatives. Use of the platform in teaching WPI’s online data visualization course has shown promising results that such initiatives are feasible. For example, many of my assignments are of the “Fork & Modify” variety. This means the assignment is to make a copy of a chart or map I’ve created in the lecture videos, and modify it to show different data. The overall effect is an astounding explosion of data visualizations. From one seed, many trees grow. And this is with only 24 students. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
I will execute a large scale education initiative starting in January 2020. This initiative will consist of a series of video lectures and assignments freely available to all, released on YouTube and VizHub. This series of videos will provide high quality educational content covering basics of computer programming to advanced interactive data visualization design and engineering. This will benefit society by enabling a vast public to educate themselves and learn marketable new skills. This initiative will also bring potential customers into contact with the VizHub platform.
Educating people is the first step towards encouraging them to produce new data visualizations. Part of the large scale education initiative will involve assignments. Students will be asked to “fork & modify” visualizations to work with new and different datasets pertaining to a variety of topics. Topic areas of interest include climate change, space exploration, human suffering, demographics, ancient history, computer science, news and current affairs. By providing direction and data for students in the form of “assignments”, a vast number of data visualizations will be produced in an extremely short period of time. These visualizations will have the potential to reveal things about our world we did not know, and help solve the largest challenges facing humankind today.
These are the expected outcomes.
The main goal of this Kickstarter is to make VizHub self sustaining. Currently, most of the income for my business comes from sporadic consulting, training, and engineering work. I would like to see VizHub customer subscriptions generating 90% of that revenue in the distant future. In quantifiable and realistic terms, I’d like to grow the revenue of VizHub customer subscriptions to $2,000 per month by November 2020. This would make the VizHub platform self sustaining and ultimately enable its long term growth and expansion.
Since the first version of VizHub was launched in August 2018, the platform has seen over 1,400 unique user logins. In September 2019 there were approximately 2,300 active users on the site (both logged in and not logged in, excluding the 2.0 beta site). Over 7,000 visualizations have been created in the platform so far. Assuming continued growth at the current rate, there should be approximately 5,000 unique user logins by November 2020.
To grow revenue of VizHub customer subscriptions to $2,000 per month, we need to convert roughly 6% of the 5,000 unique user logins to paying customers at monthly subscription cost of $7/mo for the lowest tier plan (5000 * 0.06 * 7 = $2,100). These estimates do not even consider the higher growth rate that would likely be induced by the education campaign. Although this is a simplistic revenue model with very rough estimations, I argue that these goals are realistic and achievable.
This is what I need to achieve my goals.
In order to achieve my goals in further development and commercialization of VizHub, I need to find a way to be able to invest more of my own time into it, and ultimately hire additional talent to work with me to move the project forward. Even after managing to invest over 700 hours into developing VizHub, there are so many more things to be done. I’m beginning to feel that I cannot do it alone.
As an example of how I would manage resources, consider how I hired Stamen Design to develop user interface designs for VizHub 2.0. In Spring of 2019, we reached a barter deal in which I exchanged 20 of my working hours for 20 working hours of the Stamen team, including their top-notch user interface designer. I went to San Francisco and worked with the Stamen team for one week on this. The resulting designs were astounding. With these new designs in hand, I implemented them faithfully when developing “VizHub 2.0 Beta”, which was used in this year’s WPI course and will be developed further into the commercialized VizHub product.
Currently, I feel frustrated that I need to work on other things, such as proprietary client projects, to pay the bills. I want to make VizHub and related developments my top priority activity. Funding would enable that to happen. Thus far I’ve been reluctant to take on venture capital, as this initiative is not something I want to “dilute” or eventually “exit”. This is something I want to develop and work on for the rest of my life.
Working Software
What follows are screenshots of what’s working so far in VizHub 2.0.
Designs
What follows are images of not-yet-implemented designs created by Stamen Design.
These can be implemented soon if this Kickstarter is funded.
Supporting Software
What follows are images of various software used to support the VizHub project.
Additional Research
What follows are images of miscellaneous research and future directions.
Be one of the first to get access to paid features — even before they’re launched to the public — by backing the VizHub Launch Kickstarter!
