Infogram: Infographics For The Rest Of Us

    For those of us without a designer on staff, presenting data in an attractive way is not an easy task. Sure, you can pop some data into Excel and put together a quick chart, but it’s not pretty, it’s not interactive, and it feels so 1998. The Riga-based team behind Infogr.am, currently a part of both HackFwd and Startup Sauna, has put together a nice looking service that presents data in a pretty and powerful way. It help storytellers to bring their story and tell in more visual way, but also to bring more traffic to the story though social elements.

    The company officially launched their beta last week, and has seen 25 000 users register, with 10 000 coming in the last week alone.

    To put together your infographics, you simply select a template and add a picture, text, and data. You can plug in your data yourself, or you can upload it from a pre-existing Excel file. When you’re ready to publish it, it spits out an embedable HTML5 code, which you can throw up on your website or blog. You can also just share your infographics on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, really showing the consumer angle of the service.

    The service is actually pretty flexible, to some extent. You can present multiple types of charts in one infographic, and add text wherever you want. It’s nice, because with just five templates at launch, you don’t want the feeling that you’ve already seen this infographic before. Uldis Leiterts, the co-founder of Infogram tells us he heard some feedback that Infogram works like Excel and Powerpoint, but just better. You can write story, show a chart, and in some sense make a presentation. “It wasn’t what we intended to do, but it sounds good,” he says.

    To monetize the service, the team will soon be launching a marketplace for templates. They’re also researching more angles into interactive storytelling, and thinking about some API strategies for monetization, but they’re not sharing much details. Users have also been requesting offline use, which is something they’re thinking about implementing.

    While the interface is clean and well designed, you can still tell it’s not without its beta quirks. But Infogr.am definitely has something going for them, and I can particularly picture the service being used for all the startup blogs who have data to share. So, assuming you don’t have a copy of Adobe Illustrator, Infogr.am is well worth checking out.

    Here’s one example of the service. More can be found on Infogram’s website.