iCharts launched; Invitation code for premium beta accounts

By Rajesh Setty on Tue 16 Sep 2008, 12:34 PM – 6 Comments

Disclaimer: I am involved in iCharts as a co-founder, investor and an active board member.

iCharts was launched at the recently concluded TechCrunch50 conference.

The Background:

Here are the facts:

* There are about 40 million charts online.

* If that seems a lot, compare that to 900 Billion charts that gets printed worldwide in a year.

Why the discrepancy? I think the reason is that there is no simple way to create and publish high-quality charts.

The most popular tool for creating charts is Microsoft Excel. However, Excel is not the best tool to create charts. Here are a few basic problems:

1. It is cumbersome to create charts on Excel

2. Excel created charts are not the best looking charts

3. There is no interactivity in the resulting charts. In fact, the resulting chart is an image.

4. Putting up an excel created chart online is similar to posting an image online.

5. Excel charts are not searchable (yet)

The Solution

iCharts!

iCharts is a web-based service that makes creating and publishing interactive charts simple.

Here is a sample interactive chart created using iCharts. It took a fraction of the time it would have taken to create the same (but lower quality with no interactivity) chart using Excel. This iChart shows the medal tally from the recently concluded Olympics event.

You can see the expanded version of the iChart here.

The Invitation

iCharts is a free service. However, there is a premium version where you can download iCharts to embed them into office applications or in PDF documents

For a limited time (until we reach our target premium beta accounts) you can use the following code to get a premium beta account on iCharts

Invitation Code: rsettypremium6109

Welcome and experience creating and publishing interactive charts!

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Posted in the Announcement category.

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