Kittur, Rzeszotarski Win First Prize at 3 Rivers Venture Fair
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Assistant Professor Aniket Kittur and Ph.D. student Jeff Rzeszotarski won first prize at the 3 Rivers Venture Fair University Tech Showcase for their work on DataSquid, tangible data visualization software that the pair developed at the HCII and are commercializing as a startup.
Since its debut in 2002, the 3 Rivers Venture Fair has aimed to foster the commercialization of promising technology innovations through investment. Today, it’s one of the largest, most respected technology investment showcases in the U.S., and companies featured at it have gone on to raise more than $500 million.
According to its founders, DataSquid (formerly known as Kinetica) uses real-world physics to make data fluid and responsive, letting people sift, sort, stack and stratify data with their fingers. The application unchains data from desktop computers and Excel, letting analysts manipulate data on their iPads. In DataSquid, each row of data becomes a physical object that responds to touches easily and fluidly.
“We built DataSquid to democratize data visualization, so that anyone in an organization can instantly start making better decisions with their data — not just the data experts,” Kittur said. “To do that we invented ways for people to interact with data that were never before possible, using magnets, walls and lenses to let people sift out key market segments, group core customers, and find answers to questions they didn’t know to ask."