Gary points me to this Stanford-originated startup, I’m ashamed to say this is the first I’ve heard of it: Tableau. The company was slashdotted about four hours ago and the site appears to be down. Ah, fame.
The Seattle PI has a write up here.
Started as a government research project on the Stanford campus seven years ago, the team behind Tableau worked down the hall from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In fact, the two companies share more than a common address, co-founder and CEO Christian Chabot said.
“We are like the sister company of Google in some sense, and I want to say that lightly so it is not misinterpreted,” Chabot said. “But Google was trying to make unstructured databases easy to use, and Tableau was founded to make structured databases easy to use.”
The difference is that Tableau’s software creates a graphical interface for “old-fashioned” databases such as Oracle, SQL Server and Excel while Google’s technology is built for unstructured data on the Internet, he said
Slashdot thread here.