Yashwant Raj for the Hindustan Times writes: One day while trying to make sense of data from sheets sprawled all around him and his team, Pankaj Tibrewal, then chief operating officer of Pantaloon in Mumbai, finally gave in to an idea he has been considering for a while — Business intelligence data doesn’t have to be necessarily tedious to review, share and discuss.
Last week, Tibrewal and a number of former executives from Evernote, Prezi and eBay launched Chartcube, a free iPad App that makes sharing, discussing and reviewing business data easy, and fun.
“The idea was born when I started working at McKinsey and saw that most companies spend millions in business intelligence tools but still consume data in Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations,” Tibrewal said, adding, “I realised that users need a lot more flexibility.”
Chartcube Raises $4M To Reinvent Excel And PowerPoint Alike
Ben Kepes for Forbes writes: There’s a funny thing going on in the office productivity space. Most people agree that traditional tools such as Excel and PowerPointaren’t perfectly suited to a mobile world, but no one agrees on what replacements should look like. While startups aplenty launch to fix the inherent problems – the incumbent tools continue to be used widely. Just think about the presentation space which has seen dozens of companies (SlideShare, SlideRocket, Prezi etc) rise to try and break the dominant paradigm. But nothing has really stuck.
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Today, Chartcube is launching a free app for the iPad (link to the app store) that helps anyone easily review, share and discuss data, from retail sales figures to website traffic, in a fun and intuitive new way. The company includes former executives from McKinsey , eBay , Prezi and Evernote, and is backed with $4 million in Series A funding from Shasta Ventures.
See the video on how Chartcube works here: https://www. youtube .com/watch?v=78dmadJY9wQ
“Managers typically spend 10 to 20 percent of their time making data-driven decisions. They review data in Excel, share insights in PowerPoint, and discuss with their teams in email. These antiquated tools make it difficult for people to get on the same page and the result is a ’Cycle of Indecision’, " says Pankaj Tibrewal, Co-Founder and CEO of Chartcube. “Chartcube helps by bringing together the data, the story and the discussion into one mobile app, so teams can make data-driven decisions with unprecedented efficiency and fun.”
“Cut and Paste” Waste
Even at the biggest companies today, enterprise data still flows into Excel, where managers spend hours reviewing and pivoting the data and preparing insights to share with their teams. The insight sharing usually consists of pasting charts from Excel into Powerpoint slides, where a narrative can be added. Teams often struggle to keep track of attachments, and to follow the conversation that unfolds in the email thread. The result is a broken and untenable workflow that frustrates the growing desire to be more data-driven and to make more decisions based on data.
Chartcube spent a year reimagining the experience of data collaboration for a small touch screen, and has created the optimal workspace for data-driven decision making.
Consumer crossover mobile apps such as Evernote , Dropbox and Gmail are already making a dent in the enterprise because they are easy and convenient for workers to use. Chartcube is amongst the first of a new breed of business apps that is directed at the business consumer and takes inspiration from the killer user experiences of the best consumer mobile apps and the accessibility of the freemium business model.
Chartcube is among startups, like Evernote , Prezi and Quip , that are carving slices out of the Microsoft Office suite, bringing a fresh, mobile-first alternative to old desktop-based workflows. In Chartcube’s case, it is the combination of some parts of Excel and some parts of Powerpoint, which are the basis of a very common and very limiting data collaboration workflow used across almost every type of company.
How Chartcube Works:
Takes in data in Excel from Mail app or Dropbox (other data sources and cloud storage services will be added later)
Creates all the permutations and combinations of the charts and organizes these charts in an intuitive and easily navigable “cube” interface
Allows users to review the data very easily - by being able to flip through various charts, aggregating in different ways, ordering, filtering, etc.
Allows users to add comments to charts and share with others
Enables a discussion about the data and insights, much like the comments on a photo album in Facebook
“Sharing insights via email across Excel and PowerPoint files is a cumbersome, fragmented, and frustrating experience,” says Larry Maher, Director at Kimberly-Clark. “Chartcube allows me to consolidate the clutter into one sharable, interactive cube. It enables decisions to be made in hours instead of days.”
“Companies like Prezi, Evernote and Quip have reimagined parts of the Microsoft Office capabilities for the new social and mobile context,” says Ravi Mohan, Managing Director of Shasta Ventures. “Now ChartCube is redefining the way knowledge workers understand and collaborate around data that drive their business, Chartcube is to data sharing what Instagram was to photo sharing"
Chartcube was founded in 2013 by Pankaj Tibrewal, who was formerly a consultant at McKinsey and the COO of Pantaloons , one of India’s largest clothing retailers. Pankaj got the inspiration for Chartcube , literally, while sprawled on the floor of a Pantaloons store struggling to have a team discussion about hundreds of retail metrics that had been printed on enormous sheets of paper. The team now includes Deepak Alur, Jack Mardack and Daniel Lu, formerly of eBay , Prez i and Evernote respectively.