Tableau Opens Data Analysis Contest; Winner to Earn $5K in Prizes and will be Announced on stage at The Economist’s Ideas Economy Conference

SEATTLE, WA, May 19, 2011 – Today marks the opening of a new data analysis competition using Tableau Public, a free tool for creating and publishing interactive graphs on the web. The competition encourages people to create interactive data visualizations about business, finance or real estate trends and publish them in their blogs or websites. $5,000 in prizes will be awarded to the winner, along with the chance to win more. Tableau Software, the global leader in rapid-fire business intelligence, is sponsoring the contest along with support from The Economist and its Ideas Economy conference “Making Sense of the Deluge”, an event devoted to the new world of data. To enter, people should go to http://www.tableausoftware.com/biz-viz-contest.

“Telling interactive stories with data is easier and faster with Tableau,” said Christian Chabot, CEO Tableau Software. “People can rapidly build data rich interactive applications for their websites, blogs and portals without programming or special skills. By presenting this contest with The Economist, we’re giving experienced analysts and novices alike an opportunity to use Tableau to demonstrate their skills at bringing data to life.”

Current alternatives for data story-telling are inadequate. Often, data is pasted into tables, posted as files that are difficult to use or shown in static charts. Or, specially skilled programmers spend weeks building single-purpose widgets. Tableau is helping to solve this. With its interactive visualizations and dashboards, Tableau Public helps people build interactive data applications that are useful, beautiful and shareable on the web. No special plug-ins are required, all that’s needed to see and use the data is a web browser.

Contest Details
The contest is open to U.S. residents who have downloaded Tableau Public. Entrants compete by creating an interactive visualization using any business, finance or real estate data, and then submitting an application to enter the contest. The contest closes June 3rd. The winner will be announced on stage at The Economist’s Ideas Economy Conference June 8 in Santa Clara, CA.

In addition, the winner will receive a copy of Tableau Desktop, expanded Tableau Public account limits, and a conference registration to the 2011 Tableau Customer Conference in Las Vegas, with travel and hotel expenses covered for two people. The winner will also win the chance to compete with the winners of two other visualization contests at the conference in a final “Iron Viz” championship, whose winner will take away $2,000 and a new iPad2.

For further information on the competition please go to http://www.tableausoftware.com/biz-viz-contest. To get Twitter updates on the contest, follow @tableau.

About Tableau Software

Tableau Software is the leading provider of visual analytics and rapid-fire business intelligence software. Ranked by Gartner in 2011 as the world’s fastest growing business intelligence company, Tableau makes its award-winning applications available for download at http://www.tableausoftware.com/trial. They enable anyone to easily create and share interactive data visualizations, dashboards and analytics from virtually any data, even massively big data, and can scale to organizations of any size or reach. For more information, please visit http://www.tableausoftware.com.

Media Contact:

Elissa Fink
Tableau Software
efink@tableausoftware.com
206-633-3400