In Fast Company...

Today Fast Company announced its Innovation By Design Awards this morning and we were humbled to find out that we were named to their Honorable Mention list for Graphic Design and Data Visualization.

Fast Company's exceptional editorial reputation has translated into a handful of awards that are among the tech world's most coveted.

From the Most Innovative Companies to the Innovation by Design, these are fiercely competitive contests. Innovation by Design attracted 1,700 entries - a record.

To have made the honorable mention list is a tremendous achievement and wonderful acknowledgement of the exceptional work that our engineering team has produced.

One of the elements that distinguishes MapD is that we have not only leveraged the GPU to produce breathtaking query speeds, but we have also used those same GPUs to produce stunning point maps, choropleths, scatter plots and other visual outputs.

Visual analytics has transformed how businesses operate but the massive amount of data that is produced today is threatening to swamp the ship. Applications that grew up making excel pretty, graduated to larger datasets of 1M rows or more.

But 1M rows is not "large" anymore. The tools designed to render them visually don't work well at the scale we see in the modern enterprise - working sets of hundreds of millions or even billions of rows.

At that scale, they update slowly, if at all, becoming the equivalent of stale powerpoint.

This is why we are seeing such intense interest in GPUs. With the right software, billions of rows update in milliseconds, even with multiple concurrent users firing multiple queries.

Don't try that on your legacy BI frontend.

We are delighted to be named to the list with such a great group of companies and will continue to push the envelope.

In fact, look for an announcement of our next major release of the Immerse frontend in the coming weeks.