I love playing with data. I’m always poring over Google Analytics looking for ways to improve things on my sites. If you’re like me, then you’ll almost certainly enjoy Swivel, the “YouTube of data.” They’re a San Francisco based company that makes it extremely easy to visualize and compare data. For instance, you can take a look at cities with low temperature variance and how their highs and lows vary over the course of a year. (I can tell you that Chicago is not on that list with a high of 12 degrees today after much warmer weather just a few weeks ago.) I still haven’t figured out how to make the most out of Swivel, but I definitely see the potential for using it to identify some interesting relationships.
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(affiliate link) about invention and innovation. It was a good read, and it put all kinds of new ideas in my head. One of the stories in the book is bout how the author and Yale professor, Barry Nalebuff, and one of his students, Seth Goldman, teamed up to start Honest Tea, which now seems to go by the name Honest Beverages. They were doing a case study on Coke and Pepsi in class, and both Barry and Seth agreed that most retail beverage options were either way too sweet or way too watered down. They wanted something in between, and it happened that Barry had just returned from studying the tea industry in India when Seth e-mailed him to continue the conversation that started in class. They kept running with the idea, and soon after Honest Tea was born. In 1998 the Bethesda, MD based company had 3 employees and $250,000 in sales, and last year those numbers rose to 87 employees and $38 million in sales. 
