FlowingData, if you don't already read them: start now

FlowingData has a nice post today rounding up 20 data visualizations related to crime and criminals. Most revolve around maps with temporal components shoehorned into a few. We love maps here at Graphient. We love them for how they visually describe space, and we really love them for the way they provide a fixed contextual grid for organizing other kinds of data. The map visualizations presented at FlowingData stop short of adding in other data and stick to simply reporting the facts of crime, but those maps could have been used to introduce and connect all sorts of other (possibly sensitive) socioeconomic data and maybe tell a deeper story about crime.

We’ve started building out our new site. Go take a look. Then come back and say complimentary things about it in the comments section of this post.

In 17 days, our first beta release of FreeTime will come out. Also our new website. Pressure’s on.

This is directly between mark's desk and my desk.

We have a mission statement here at Graphient. It took us a fair amount of time and a lot of re-writes to work it out properly. One reason it took so long was some confusion on my part about what a mission statement really is. It seemed pretty obvious to me that our mission as hardheaded businessmen was to make huge amounts of money. Or, put another way, to become profitable in a timely manner and maximize shareholder value. Turns out those aren’t missions, and they cannot be used to accurately measure the success of the enterprise or to motivate those involved.

We finally worked it out as “Graphient’s mission is to provide everyone in the world with platforms for the organization and visualization of information that are simple enough for any home user, but powerful enough for research, science, and business.”

There’s nothing in there about profitability, and were we a Silicon Valley company we might be content to end this conversation here and go play frisbee with our dog or something. Fortunately we live in New York, and if living here has taught us anything, it is that if you don’t make enough money for rent and food, you have to move back to whatever provincial backwater you came from.

That’s a round about way of saying that one of the tests for whether or not you are a company or just a bunch of guys sitting in room together engaged in company-like behavior is profitability. Profit is the test that must be met. It is what validates the mission, and without it you don’t have an enterprise, you have a meme.

Hello world, welcome to the Graphient Blog. If you somehow stumbled in here you may need a little background information. Graphient is a New York City based software startup. We are currently working like gangbusters to release our first product, an application called FreeTime. We’ll post more about that later. First I’d like to layout what we intend to use this forum for.

We’re going to talk about a few different things here. We’re going to talk about starting up, and what a business is. We’re going to talk about our products, what it’s like making them, and the philosophy behind them. We’re going to talk about design, and we’re going to talk about data. Those last two are so important they should be capitalized: Design, and Data. We will probably also occasionally rant about some subject related to what we’re doing or our office environment. We’ll do our best to keep that to a minimum. Finally, we’re going to talk about user experience and how it informs the way we run things around here.

I hope you find it interesting, or at least diverting. Now, get back to work.