Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg visit hackNY Fellows: Data, Visualization, and the transition from BigCo to startup

Thursday night was our second official hackNY Fellows' weekly gathering and another evening of beautiful weather.Hilary, Evan, and Chris got to chat with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of flowingmedia.com, along with Mark Hansen, who is visiting NYC for the summer to spend his sabbatical from UCLA at The New York Times. Afterwards, Martin sat down with the hackNY Fellows to discuss data, visualization, and the exciting transition Fernanda and Martin are making from years at IBM to forming their own (currently two-person) startup.Fellows learned about how Fernanda and Martin have formed their own path, both in terms of research and their own careers, and saw some great demos illustrating the creativity and hard work that goes behind data science and data visualization.Martin demoed several visualization projects, including Many Eyes, a tool to empower people to create their own visualizations, and Fleshmap, an exploration of human desire through crowd-sourced data.Owen Davis of NYC Seed Start was kind enough to let us hold the event at 160 Varick Street, one of NYU-Poly's three incubators. We also chatted briefly with some of the startups working there late into the evening.It was a great chance also for us all to compare notes on the fantastic projects going on in each of the Fellows' respective startups. We're looking forward to hearing more about the great things they'll do this summer!