Discover the Future of Visual Data Mining with Microsoft Pivot

The world has too much information.  If you query any search engine for any topic, you will likely be greeted by millions of links of results.  Everyone knows that text cannot possibly be the end all, be all of data discovery.  Surely as the volume of unmanaged data grows, which grows about 70% year over year, better tools must exist to navigate such data sets.  Microsoft Live Labs is trying to tackle this enormous challenge with a technology called “Pivot.” 

“Pivot is our most ambitious to date. Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web.”

This is going to be a big area of research for Microsoft.  If you think about the actual problems that people face when discovering data, Pivot tackles a very serious challenge.  Data insights is going to be increasingly key for any individual doing research, commercial or academic.

If you still can’t see how cool this is, read Brandon Watson’s blog article about using Crunchbase as a data collection.