Infogr.am to launch video creation tool for data visualisations

Infogr.am, a free tool for creating infographics, is due to launch a video creation tool in the new year to let users make animated visualisations of data.

Infogr.am founder Uldi Leiterts revealed the tool at the LeWeb Paris conference yesterday, as reported by The Next Web, with a video showing the design process and final product.

"The only thing you need to do is take pictures, text and data and place them in slides and press the play button," Leiterts told Journalism.co.uk. The Infogr.am video creator will then animate elements automatically or according to options chosen by the user, he said.



The accompanying promotional video shows a mixture of drag-and-drop functionality for different elements, drop-down menus to select animation or styles or graph designs and a timeline bar of slides to map the video's progression. Leiterts said there is no plan for a time limit on videos

"Video is the future," said Leiterts of the benefits of video over static infographics, " it's very engaging, it captures the attention and for online media it increases the time spent on site – which means more exposure for the advertisers – and it massively increases social shares."

The product is still a prototype, said Leiterts, and although the Infogr.am team will be aiming to release the software in 2014 there is no specific date in mind for launch. Once launched, the video package will work on a freemium model but the precise details have yet to be determined, he said.

"We want to have everyone use it so we will have several price points," Leiterts explained, "the first will be free and we will also have a special offer for the brands so they can have full control for the look and feel of the infographic."

Since launching in February 2012, Infogr.am has won a range of tech start up and data tool awards. According to their website, the Latvian company had over 500,000 users in June 2013 and more than one million infographics have been created by users, although Leitert's said the number of users has now reached over a million.

"We have always been here to make data visualisations more engaging and make more people work with data," Leiterts said, "and we've always wanted to make both the decision-making and journalism and storytelling more based on data."

"The world would be better placed if we can look into numbers rather than guess them and our mission is to write the best visualisations of data."

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