Tasty Data Goodies

One Swivel

You may have noticed that we have two different websites right now: Swivel Preview for all your public data and Swivel Business for your private numbers.

Today, we have some important news for everyone who uses Swivel: we are merging Swivel and Swivel Business into one website.

The new Swivel will use the technology from Swivel Business, so it may feel a bit different than the website you're used to.  However, we will do our best to make sure the transition has minimal effects on your current data, charts, and comments.

We will keep you updated as we move along in this process. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them here or email us.

We encourage everyone to check out the new Swivel and tell us what you think. Your feedback is very important to us. (It's still a work in progress, so please excuse the rough edges.)

Request an invitation to the new Swivel.

Swivel Business: Try It Out

In the last few months we've rebuilt Swivel Business from scratch. We're really excited about the website's new direction. So excited, in fact, that Swivel Business is currently a preview of what all of Swivel will look like in the future (more on this soon).

Check out Swivel Business and let us know what you think. You can either leave your comments here or email us.

And without further ado, here are the latest features. In addition to uploading spreadsheets and creating charts, now you can explore numbers and share insights on Swivel:

Explore charts
Want to see last year's sales? Or just last month's? We make it easy to dive right into your data so you can visualize the numbers however you like.

Publish your work
Just press publish when you're ready to share your charts and numbers. Until then, Swivel will save drafts for your eyes only.

Leave a note
Want to point out that web visitors peaked last month? Have a question about why? Leave a note and share insights with your team.

Check your inbox
With Swivel, you'll never miss a beat. Get all the latest updates and insights in your inbox.

 

Get an exclusive peek at the new Swivel! If you haven't already requested an invitation, what are you waiting for? Join the party.

What's changing at Swivel

Until now, Swivel Business has been focused on monitoring automatically updated time-series data. However, based on your stories, suggestions, and feedback, we've learned that we need to make some adjustments. So we're shaking things up a bit. Here's how Swivel Business is going to change.

What We've Learned

Most importantly, we've learned we need to make it easier for non-data experts to use Swivel.  With this in mind, we've made it super easy to upload data. You can now upload any Excel file into Swivel, or you can simply copy and paste data from your spreadsheet.

We've also realized that sharing data can be difficult, to say the least. Spreadsheets can be overwhelming to share with others, while slides are often too static.  And when you spend so much time formatting your data for sharing, you have less time to talk about the numbers and find insights. So, we're working on making it painless to share your data in a way that lets others explore and interact with it.

What's Changed

Swivel Business will continue to have the functionality you're used to if you're already using the product (for changes see our previous blog post).  You will be able to create reports, add notes to data sets, and share data within your workgroups.

However, starting today, we're adding a few new features that are indicative of our shift in focus: you can upload spreadsheets and create tables from them to share with your colleagues. We're still working on creating charts from spreadsheets, and adding charts and tables to reports. But we promise you, it will be worth the wait.

What's Next

We know it's a lot to take in, and it's a lot of work for us to do too.  So while we put our noses to the grindstone, Swivel is going to be in transition for a while.  Because this transition might be a bit rough, we are turning off billing for the time being.  We'll turn it back on when the product is ready, at a price more appropriate for the direction we're moving in.

If you would like to blog about Swivel Business during this time, please contact us.  We would be happy to talk with you and answer questions you have about the product.

Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm for Swivel Business.  We've listened to your stories, your triumphs, and your woes about sharing data.  And we're building this product for you.  We'd love to hear your questions, concerns, and thoughts on the new direction. 

What's cooking in the Swivel kitchen?

Hey everyone,

We've been making a lot of changes around Swivel lately.  And we want to share what we're cooking up in the Swivel kitchen with all of you.

For the next release of Swivel Business, we're working on enhancing performance, improving Swivel's look and feel, and giving you more interactivity when it comes to your data.

We are also dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 in the next release. We want to take advantage of the latest technologies, so we can build a better, more interactive product for you. As the possibilities expand for web applications, IE6 stands in the way of giving you the ultimate experience.

Since Microsoft released IE7 in 2006, the number of people using IE6 has fallen to a small minority of Swivelers.  Only 22% of visitors to swivel.com use the browser.  On Swivel Business, that number is even lower (10%).  And we're not the only ones moving on from the old technology; actually we're kind of jumping on the bandwagon here. Companies such as Apple, 37 signals, and Salesforce dropped support for IE6 earlier this year.

In order to keep using Swivel, people with the IE6 browser should take the chance to upgrade. All of these browsers are free to download and use:
  Download Internet Explorer 7
  Download Mozilla Firefox
  Download Safari

One other note about the upcoming release: we've also de-prioritized a few small features in favor of building newer, better ones (stay tuned).  You will no longer be able to rearrange reports with a simple drag and drop, but we're working on a more powerful interaction. Also, if your data is hooked up to our API, it will need to be reconfigured to work with our new API.  No worries though. Based on your feedback, this one should be easier to use.

Check back soon. We can't wait to share the new features we've been working on with all of you.

Thank you for your continued support. We always appreciate your thoughts and .

We're Talkin' APIs

Okay, so let's say you had this API thing for Swivel.

What would you build?