 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE at Tableau Conference 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back. You're going live in Seattle for Tableau's data 14 conference. Hashtag data 14. If you want to join us, go to crowdchat.net slash data 14. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. This is theCUBE. Our next guest is Ben Jones, Senior Product Marketing Manager with Tableau. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Tableau, a lot of great press, a lot of great community. Is that part of the plan? Is that part of the marketing plan? Or is it just the great product sells itself? Huge success on the product side. Clearly the product announcements are here, but great community. People have Kool-Aid injection of Tableau. People are happy. Right, no doubt. I mean, the product is great, but you're right. I mean, there's a community aspect that's hard to engineer. And it seems like it's grown out of a number of factors, one of which Tableau Public, the product I manage, is literally a free version of the software that anyone can use and share data online. So it just creates this network of individuals who are kind of having this dialogue around data in the public arena. So it's a lot of fun. You know, we had someone come up to us yesterday and said, oh, we have big fans of theCUBE. Thanks for sharing the data and the commentary. And then we started talking to her and she was a woman who was changing careers and she was talking about how I'm not going to name names, but the other older vendors, big upfront license, huge heavy lift to deploy, a lot of work to get the time to value. And it brings up the comments that Jeff and I were talking. So the question for you to comment on is, is that we are living in a cloud, born in the cloud kind of mentality where people are shifting into new roles and the freemium model is working. So can you comment? Obviously that's in your wheelhouse. So, you know, how has that played out? Obviously people play with it, get addicted. Obviously visualization is like the eye candy, but the data behind is real. So how has that rolled out? I mean, obviously freemium makes a lot of sense, but from a business perspective, share some color on how that's rolled out. Well, I think one of the remarkable things about Tableau Public is just that since it's free, journalists around the world can use, and bloggers as well can use Tableau to visualize everything from the World Cup to the election results. And so it allows people like me, for example, when I first got involved and started using Tableau, I was able to download Tableau Public and start to use it. And like you said, really get hooked on it. So it creates, I think, an environment where people can try and when they learn our software they see that it is actually very easy to use. And so like you said, they really start to get addicted to it. And so I think it was just a great stroke of genius on the part of the founders to sit there and say, hey, Tableau is really all about visualizing data, seeing and understanding data. Not just company data, we're talking about any data, data that's in the public arena even. And so how can we go about allowing individuals to talk about data at a higher level than just within companies? So it's created a little bit of a momentum happening where like you said, you know, I'm included in this as well of people changing careers to join. What they see is just a really a way of speaking data. And so, talk about how journalists would use that. So obviously we love data, we have our data, we have a data science team. Right. Advertising is kind of going away in the sense of the old banner ads, but people want, the data seems to be the asset in media. What can we do with Tableau Public? Well, a journalist, you know, they're going to kind of be making a point and data journalism is a term you'll see out there and it's really becoming more and more common, but the reality is data journalism has been around for a long time. What's different now is that there's a whole lot more data. The tools that are available to the journalists to make use of that data are becoming easier and easy to use like Tableau. And so we work with, you know, journalists like, say for example, Sarah Riley at the New York Daily News, Buena Serres has a, you know, organization called La Nación and they're just essentially augmenting, enhancing their stories with interactive data, day in and day out. And it's really a global phenomenon. So sometimes we'll look at the top 10 visualizations on Tableau Public worldwide and, you know, we'll see visualizations from people as far from Chile to Belarus. And so sometimes the top 10 doesn't even include one from the United States. So it's very global and a journalist sees data as a way to make a very compelling point. So is it integrated into the journalist workflow or is it into more in the CMS side? Because obviously we have the blog, we have WordPress and a bunch of stuff behind the scenes. There's Twitter data, we have that as well. Is it, where do you guys sit? Who uses Tableau, the actual writers or the? Yeah, in some cases. So John Shown, who's a reporter at CNBC in New Jersey, creates the visualizations himself. Sometimes we'll see a newsroom have a team of specialists that work with data and they'll be paired up with a reporter to create an interactive graphic for that reporter's story. But since the software is easier to use, you do see individual reporters themselves, bloggers as well, creating their own visualizations for their own stories. In fact, even sometimes finding the story based on the data discovery itself. So the Nate Silver was here last year or here, but in DC you guys had him. Obviously he's the poster child for data journalism because the election coverage. How he's doing at ESPN, we'll see how that plays out, but that is the trend. I mean, you see that, and obviously he was speaking last year, any new updates around that front that you can share in terms of trends around that kind of new role? Oh, even since last year when Nate gave his great keynote, we've seen more data journalism specific sites launch. So the upshot by New York Times, Vox, these other sites where the data is really front and center in a broad swath of their content. Where I think it's going though, actually believe it or not, is that it's just gonna become part and parcel to the way a journalist does their work. It's not going to be necessarily something that's a specialty anymore. For example, video journalism or photo journalism, those were buzzwords of the past as well. Now let's just integrate it into the way those stories are told. So I think the same will be true of interactive data within the sphere of journalism. You're just going to start to see, and in the years down the road, that's just kind of expected it to be a way to articulate a point, and hopefully what will follow there is an increase in the numerical literacy of the population. Also adds a new element to the production, right? So I mean, to me, obviously you tweet, people tweet all the time, oh yeah, had the hotdog for launch, or they type about something specific, domain expertise type chats, tech chats. We have the crowd chat application container, engagement container. So data's being acquired. So how do you guys view that these new sources of data, and how does someone get their data into Tableau Public? Yeah, it's a great question. So Tableau Public is a version of the application that can connect to Excel files, text files, access databases, but you know, there's all these storehouses out there. This is open data movement where virtually every country around the world has some kind of a portal where you can go get and download that data. But it's not really easy to make a lot of sense of what's in there, it's accessible, but it's not necessarily something that people are gleaning insight from unless someone does the work of visualizing it. So where Tableau comes in is it's the tool to be able to connect to all that raw data and create it out of that visualization that people can understand. And what we see is dwell times go up. If you have a story with a data visualization on it, the reader's going to stay. There's something for them to do. They can check it out. They can explore the data for themselves. Sharing goes way up, especially if you let them drill down to their part of the country. Maybe there's a zip code lookup and I can see what this story, maybe it's IRS contributions are like in my neck of the woods, they're much more likely to share on social when you give them that kind of a story. You know, Ben, I kind of smile because sometimes I say a lot of things that are wrong, but sometimes I say things that are right. I wrote a post in 2008, I think it was, on my old blog before I started SiliconANGLE and it was around Twitter and I said, data's the new development kit. Back in the old days when I was writing software, you had to get a development kit, a Microsoft or what not. And that ends up becoming a true thing now. You guys essentially have created an instruction for programming where data is the programming tool, where the data is the resource. So, can you share some updates on how the product itself has changed from even go back into a few years back into today, to make it more user friendly? So that the fact that journalists can do it is a testament, but what other new things are you adding? Yeah, well when we launched Tableau 8, the game changer there for the journalist was what we call free form dashboards. So instead of having to arrange all of your views in a tiled fashion, you can drag and drop and place things in a floating manner. That really opened up a whole world of multimedia. So you can put a video in the corner of the timeline and have that interact with the data itself. You can float a logo or an image or a picture from the story right there within the chart or dashboard. So that was a big game changer that was last year. What we've done this year, which I think has been huge for journalists is frankly making it available on the Mac. I mean, newsrooms across the world very commonly use Mac. So we were real excited to this Tableau public team to be able to finally go into those newsrooms and not have to ask them to use Bootcamp or one of those virtual machines. And they love that. Where it's going from here, we've got this wealth of author generated content on our server and it's not always as accessible as we want it to be. So we're really seeing a great pathway forward for Tableau to make searchable, findable, more integrating into a community style site where people can follow their favorite data visualization author or comment on a vis or things like that or some things we're exploring. But we're really trying to take this momentum and build on it. You know, what's interesting about, I mean, first of all, I love the geek out on data journalism. It's what I think about pretty much every minute of the day when I'm not relaxing. But data is the gravity around a lot of the stuff going on around conversation. So when you look at the social web, you look at the communities that you guys have, sharing and collaboration is a big part of the new production that we see. So you're starting to see some of that now with some of the crowdsourcing stuff with our crowd chat. You see people sharing content with attribution, what not, it's going on, but that's the trend. So what are you guys doing on the sharing front? Because when data gets created and visualized, it is a presentation. I mean, infographics is a good example of an elementary version of it. But when you start getting into someone who's got some unique skillset or domain expertise, they might stumble upon a little nugget that can open up a conversation, open up more content. Do you guys have a sharing element? Yeah, Tableau Public was really built for sharing. So at the bottom of every visualization is a share footer that doesn't just share the visualization, but it shares the version of the dashboard that the reader has filtered to. So in other words, if my home state is Washington and there's election results, I click on Washington and I see the results in my area. When I share that using the footer in a Tableau Public visualization, it's sending to my network and my connections that version of the dashboard that focuses in on the part of the story that I wanna share and tell. But also, Tableau Public, sort of like YouTube, you can get the embed code and we really love to see it when there's republishing occurring, when people are talking about visualizations that others have made or posted. So yeah, and not only that, but it's a great way for people to be able to learn. You can download the workbook itself with Tableau Public, kind of reverse engineer what that person did and see how they made what they made. So it's a great way for people to learn some best practices and some techniques. Have you had any inquiries about the CMS side of the business? One of the things I always rant in town that fits on the table is, I mean, we love WordPress, don't get me wrong, but WordPress is kind of old and clunky. CMS. Now you're seeing, we had build our own CMS on CrowdChat, but you're starting to see things like tag board, rebel mouses of the world. You're seeing these companies having a whole new style, kind of an unstructured, anyway, canvas, you guys certainly showed a lot of that demo on stage. Do you see you guys fill in that gap or some other cool CMSs out there because if you have the ability to pull in multiple visualizations, the storytelling becomes really compelling? Well, with the embed code, the goal is to be able to let the Table of Public Author take their visualization and drop it right into whatever CMS they're using. It works better. So WordPress is an example of WordPress.org is an example of a CMS where it works particularly well. A lot of these newsrooms have very customized CMS applications and sometimes that can be tricky, but there's usually workarounds where you can embed an iframe or something of that nature, but I don't see us really kind of becoming a CMS, more allowing visualizations to- But you'll support it through the iframe, basically. Yes, right. That's pretty much the vehicle. So similar to YouTube, our servers on the Table of Public Side are serving up these interactive visualizations, and so the goal is just allow that journalist, blogger, researcher to be able to put their work in whatever site it is that they want to share. One of the things I also write for creative forms, and they don't let you put iframes except for like a short list. Hopefully that will change, but is that a common thread or is that just a one-off? No, so I think it was more common in the past. WordPress.com is an example which is obviously a very popular blogging platform where you needed to have a short list embed code to be able to have an interactive iframe serve it up on the site, but going forward, I'm not seeing that incurring more. I'm assuming more, as long as it's the HTML5 compliant, there's a lot of ways in which those CMSs, for the most part, the ones that where we see trouble are where they're, I would call them, antiquated versions of CMSs, or very highly customized to the point where it's difficult because of all of the, just the elaborate nature of the CMS that got built, but the standard ones are pretty easy to use. So we're going to have to kick the tires. I was talking to Dave Martin, also some of the product guys, we're going to try to get some of our crowd chat data into Tableau to get that visualized, because I just love what you guys have done with the product. But to change gears, I want to get your perspective on journalism, since we're talking about journalism. There seems to be kind of like a change going on in journalism. What's your take on it? And I'll see, with now more connected mobile devices, now with visualization, do you see any bright spots in journalism and what do you wish you could change? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it's an interesting time for journalism. Obviously, we've seen some, it's a tough profession, right? I mean, a world from a global standpoint, obviously we're seeing some stories of these, some tragic type stories coming in, but also freedom of the press is slipping in a lot of countries, and so that's a concern. But regardless, and even in some countries where maybe they're less democratic than others, we're definitely seeing journalists have an interest in showing interactive data. That's, I think, a positive trend. And as I mentioned before, I hope that it becomes just part and parcel to the way a journalist does their job. But I had the chance to go to the New School University in New York City last week and work with Scott Klein, who's a top data journalist at ProPublica. And I'll tell you, these university students, designers, journalists, they really took to it. They seemed like they were very excited and passionate. They had a lot of fun interacting with the data. So I think there's a new wave of journalists coming in that are really going to find this to be, you know, an activity that's not as intimidating. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, obviously, we have all open content, so we believe in open data, sharing the data, whether on theCUBE or on the blog or on Wikibon. But we interviewed Andrew Kreitzer from Young Kid coming out of a UVA. Okay. He's a total tableau junkie. Right. And it's changed his career because he's just in math, not in a stats geek, but he's an operational guy. He's basically turned it into a career now working at LinkedIn. He was on theCUBE earlier. That's the trend. The younger generation, this is like oxygen to them, right? It's like a PowerPoint. Yeah, I think so. And we're just having a conversation over breakfast with one of my colleagues from India and same thing over there. You know, they're really trying to find their own identity with these tools and try to find the way to express, you know, what they want to express. But a great example of a journalist who has really risen to the top using Tableau Public is Chad Skelton, who's based out of Vancouver, British Columbia. So he just recently won the Global Editor Network's Data Journalism Portfolio Award of 2014. So four of his five visualizations that he submitted were Tableau Public visualizations. So he won, you know, kind of an amazing award. So it's nice to see, like you said, these individuals finding a way to use the tools and their disposal, tell the stories of our time, really, and get recognized for that. So I think it's gratifying for all of us, especially on my Tableau Public team, when we see journalists really, you know, earn quite a number of accolades for their work. Yeah, and any data journalists out there watching, you know, we're hiring at SiliconANGLE, so if you're interested in the geek side, we certainly love data. And we have our own little data practice. The thing I want to bring up now is, my little always rant about the blogging and publishing is, and the media is, it's a real time game now, right? So you have the old model of, I need to get a source material, I got to call someone up, validate the facts, more and more you hear sources close to the company, because the Wall Street Journalist trying to beat that blogger and you got a zillion percent journalist now. So data becomes instant source material. So one of the trends that's really a bright spot is, the source material is right there. Yeah, it's there to mine. It's there to mine. So the new journalism technique is source material. Obviously, Rolodex, Twitter. Yeah. Two, data to back it up or fact checking. So that seems to have, the lack of good data has kind of dumbed down the journalism and people have been complaining about the content mills and the lack of source material. But now, you guys have this tool. Right, well, a couple examples. One, after the Boston Marathon bombing, we saw the Guardian in the UK mine Boston.com for, I would say is maybe one of the positive sides of the story, which was all the individuals that came out and offered a couch, a hot shower, a hot meal for people who were stranded in the area. So what they did is they mined a message board and they turned it into a timeline of data visualization showing how these offers began kind of pouring in. But that data was there and it was accessible for anyone and they were the creative thinkers to go and mine that, turn that into a visualization that told a very compelling side of the story. Another example, last year with Obamacare, there was a period of time where the data was not very easy to find, it was not forthcoming and people were looking for it. So we did see some journalists get very creative with looking at social sentiment, looking at what people are saying as a way to discuss the story. So the data's out there, whether it's being generated in social media, whether it's posted to some portal by a government or whether you mine it some other way, there's tools like import.io, which is a tool that, similar to Tableau, you don't have to program, you can go in and actually go and mine that data. Import.io, they're based out of the UK and we see a lot of times where someone will use import.io to go find and mine a website for data, connect that data once they have it with Tableau and then they're off and running. So it's getting easier and easier to the point where you don't have to be an expert programmer to get this done. So we got one minute left, I want to jump on the whole storytelling concept because I'm a big fan of storytelling but I always roll my eyes because it's like okay, it sounds so cliche, it's been around for a while but when it starts being used as a kind of like a gimmick, it seems like a gimmick when people punch it or I know you guys talk about your keynote, I mean to get on you guys, but how can you tell the story if you don't know what the story is? So the emphasis is on data prep. So import.io, tools like that, data prep is a huge issue and an opportunity for you guys. What are you guys doing on the data prep slideshow versus for the journalists who aren't the programmers who might not be really fluent in these toolings, what can we do as journalists to be better data preppers? Well, a lot of times we'll see 80% of the time spent on a project is what we call data munging or wrangling or in Chris Dolti's keynote yesterday morning, I think he showed a tool which is going to be a game changer for journalists because you'll be able to download spreadsheet from the federal government which has headers and is formatted awkwardly and has comments in the footers and merged cells and in the past that would have been a nightmare to work with, right? You'd have to spend forever turning this thing into a workable version and so what Tableau is doing is investing in features to be able to automatically go in and detect where the data is, make that something much, much easier to connect with to try to minimize the time spent wrangling of these data. So that's a top priority for you guys. Oh, absolutely. The easier it is to connect to your data, the more likely it is that you're going to get your insight out of it and it's all about time to insight. So Ben, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I'll give you the final word. What are you excited about these days besides your product, outside of your product? What's getting you all jazzed up? Obviously you're active on the social channels. You're out there tweeting away, talking to customers. The world's transforming. DevOps born in the cloud, a whole new era of modern infrastructure and new benefits to come. What are you getting excited about? I mean, the growth itself is exciting. Our team's growing. So we get to work with more talented people. But with Tableau Public, every month someone comes out of the woodwork as being an incredibly talented individual who really changes the way we think about the way data can be shared. So I'm just excited about the next year and who we get to meet. And what's the big mega trend you think that's powering the opportunity for you guys? Ease of use, right? I mean, it's really a UX thing. I mean, to the point where this can become something that's simple that anyone can do. I mean, it really doesn't have to be something that only a specialist can do. So that to me, I think is the part of what's fueling our growth, is just the fact that we're trying to reach out and let anyone at any level of the organization make use of their data. So Ben Jones, senior product marketing manager at Tableau, talking about Tableau Public for journalists, for normal people who can put stories together, data and be participating in the consumerization of journalism, I guess was a good term. Ben, thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. This is live in Seattle. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you, John.