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April 12, 2007
An interview with...Scopia Visual Interfaces Systems
Today we are listening to Scopia Visual Interface Systems, a very young spanish company.
1 - When, how and why have you decided to start up a company focusing on infovis ?
It was decided about summer 2006, less that a year ago. The idea came from 3 people, ourselves, that by the time were doing some experiments mostly in the 3D scene. We saw that there was still a big room for data visualization, specially in our country (Spain). And therefore we decided to start a small company to develop some initial tools for commercial use. So by the end of last year we started building the company and here we are, four months later, showing our first tools.
2 - What are your education backgrounds and previous epxeriences before creating your company ?
We come from different areas of knowledge. Engineering, design, consulting, art ... we even have a sculptor 
Some of us have previous experience running a company and others are too young for that. But we are still a very small group, in fact 4.5 people. So there is no much to talk about. Lets say we have a good programmer, two good designers, a experienced consultor and a crazy guy
3 - Which is the best results your customers got using your infovis services and/or products ?
We are still finishing our products and we only have the experiences from the users at our free service macro.scopia.es. We plan to start offering our tools in the next days to organizations like museums, financial entities, education centers and public administration.
4 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?
The most exciting tool we have developed so far is "fricker. A 3D data browsing tool we have tested for things like browsing the filesystem. You can watch a video here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1942397549540648643&hl=es
or go to our site http://www.scopia.es/fricker.html for a high res avi file. But we realised that this approach might be too "futuristic to start a comercial development, so we decided to start a more traditional web tool with a small set of visualizations. Thats what we call macro.scopia, and thats the kind of product we will be selling in the next months. But of course we will use any chance to apply frickers technology and continue developing it as soon as possible.
5 - On what themes are you working now ?
We are finishing our web based system to start deploying it soon. And of course we are always thinking of new views of the data that could be integrated into macro.scopia. But basicaly we are now going through the less exciting but needed task of contacting customers.
6 - How do you think infovis solutions market will evolve in your country for next years ?
We hope a small company will success and grow making this data views popular At least we think that it can be easily introduced into museums and libraries. They are interested in making data easier to browse. So we all have a chance to change the way they show their knowledge to the public. Hopefully we will start seeing these new interfaces in their websites and information points soon.
And of course, in the internet mass of blogs and publications, we would like to see them using our free tools as we make them better and easier.
7 - If you should suggest an education programme to a student interested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?
Well, as I said before, we are a very heterogeneous group. Thats always better than one single person trying to know everything. So I would recommend to study any of the related fields like math, computer science or design, and then get into the stuff to learn as much of the rest as possible. You always have to know a bit of everything, but while being good at a certain thing. I have chosen programming and computer science, so thats what I (The programming guy) would suggest.
infoVis / information visualization / infoviz, Interviews, Profiles, resources, User Experience, User Interfaceshttp://www.mentegrafica.it/blog/2007/04/12/an-interview-withscopia-visual-interfaces-systems/
Posted by InfoVis at April 12, 2007 6:49 PM
