Google has hired two of the leading researchers in visualization.
In an understated post entitled That was fast!, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg announced that they had joined Google.
Viégas and Wattenberg led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking collaborative visualization platform Many Eyes.
They left and set up Flowing Media a few months ago. But in the post dated August 5, the pair said they were “bidding the company adieu.”
Right now we’re at orientation in Mountain View, becoming, as they say, more “googley.” In the months to come we’ll be starting a visualization group in Google’s office in Cambridge, MA. We’re very excited about the possibilities!
This is a smart move by Google. It already has a lab project called Google Public Data Explorer that aims to makes large datasets easy to explore and visualize.
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