Swivel was founded in December 2005 by Brian Mulloy, CEO (left) and Dmitry Dimov, Chief of Product (right). Before Swivel, they both worked together at BEA Systems and most recent, Grand Central Communications.

Swivel was one of the six startups selected to be featured at this year's Web 2.0 expo's launchpad. To find out the tasty data goodies that they are busy cooking up for all of us, read their blog here.

What is Swivel and how does it work?

Brian: Swivel is a website for people to upload and explore data, all kinds of data: data about sports , finances, losing weight, and more.

You can upload your data in a spreadsheet and Swivel will generate graphs from that data. Users can see graphs and gain insights from the data. In Swivel, because the data is open to the public, you can have a lot of fun insights by comparing the data that you have uploaded to other people's data.

Dmitry: Swivel is like a home for data. For example, the New York Times (NYT) recently ran an article about the cost of Iraq war, which is hundreds of billions of dollars a year and compared it with other things such as the cost of universal healthcare. When I tried to find the data used in the article, I ended up on a password protected page at NYT. There was no easy way to find the data so I just to punched the data from the newspaper article into Swivel and now people can discuss and comment on the data. This encourages debate.

I see that the two of you originally stemmed from Physics backgrounds, how was the Swivel idea born?

Brian: Dmitry and I both worked at BEA systems, one of the leading software companies selling products to the largest and richest companies in the world. With Swivel, I had the opportunity to do something different. Small and Medium Businesses was our starting point. These businesses use Google AdWords to advertise, but it is hard to analyze AdWords data and understand how it affects their business. And so we started off building a solution to help people better understand their AdWords data. That was when we started learning about data. In just a few months, we started seeing this differently and we realized that the picture for data in general is pretty bad. In our LaunchPad demo at the Web 2.0 Expo, we demonstrated through a Google search that the web doesn’t do a good job with structured data. The web has done miracles for text, photos, and videos, but the world's most important data has been neglected.

Dmitry: Studying physics grew my curiosity about the world. Physics is also about how you process and interpret data, such as experimental data. But data isn’t always complicated and hard to understand. What we want to do at Swivel is demonstrate that data can also be fun and interesting.

How does your startup attract and keep employees and customers given all the competitiveness in today’s market, Brian?

This was interesting because retaining employees and acquiring customers turned out to be based on the same strategy. As it turns out, there is a very large group of nerdy people who are obsessive about data and stats. And there isn't a place for these groups of people right now except Swivel. We are the only player in town when it comes to data. So our job as other companies enter our market space is to keep moving quickly and ensure that we have the best feature set.

In terms of product development Dmitry, where do you see Swivel in 3-5 years?

People have branded us as the "YouTube for data." That gives a flavor of where Swivel can go. Data can be community oriented, fun, and interesting. We want to be a place for discussions and collaboration around data, a huge repository of the world's most important data that uses the intelligence of the crowd to discover interesting relationships across data sets. Our private data version will allow businesses to upload their data, understand what that data means, what the trends are, and also compare it with all the public data on Swivel.

It seems the biggest obstacle Swivel faces to reach mass-scale adoption is through the contribution and sharing of datasets from creditable and reputable sources, what is Swivel’s approach to address this issue?

Brian: We do this in two parts. What makes Swivel interesting and compelling is that we are not a .gov site where some bureaucrat decides what data to publish. At Swivel, people are uploading data they care about.

At the same time, we started the Official Source program for data. It means, we have sat down with the provider of the data and we can say with confidence that they are the official source of data they upload. OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the world's largest provider of official data, wanted to open up their data for the public, and they became our first Official Source provider.

Sara, our Data Chief, is working to create a pipeline of folks like OECD putting their data into Swivel.

Dmitry: Your own name, Folksonomy, is all about people contributing content and taking control of how content is organized. Some of the best content out there today was created by users. Having official statistics from reputable sources is very important for us, and that's what the Official Source program is about. At the same time, we envision people contributing some unique data, not necessarily official or certified, but nevertheless very interesting. Imagine some hobbyist collecting local air pollution data using a sensor, or someone keeping track of cars leaving Toyota's dealerships as a unique measure of Toyota's sales.

Brian, you left your position as the President and General Manager at Grand Central Communications and decided to start Swivel, could you please share your feelings about making that huge decision?

Timing wasn’t right for that business but timing for Swivel is. Big ideas have a different emotional reaction and a lot of how we make big decisions are driven by emotion.

Dmitry, I see that you left your position as the Director of Product Management at Grand Central Communications to co-found Swivel, could you please share some of the reasons for taking the entrepreneurial plunge?

I was happy to jump into building something that helps concrete people. Things like getting real-life feedback from individual users. One day, I had that revelation, if we get this right, my kids, who are in elementary school, will be able to use Swivel for their homework.

Message to Leave with:

At Swivel, we feel that half the Internet is missing. Things like photos, videos, and text have been taken care of, but data has been neglected. Our mission at Swivel is to liberate the world's data and make it useful for people, so that they can make insights and share them with others. We encourage your readers to come to Swivel and play with data, bring their own data or their opinions, comment, explore data, debate and argue, share their discoveries, and have some serious fun!