First Giveaway… a Tableau Software Personal Edition!

February 17, 2009

Topic

Contests

It’s time for the first competition of our 10k giveaway. Not only is this first prize super awesome, but we’ve made it extremely easy to enter to win. This one’s going to be open until March 2, 8pm EST, so you’ve got PLENTY of time to enter.

Prize Description

Tableau Software aims to make “databases and spreadsheets understandable to ordinary people” with an emphasis on statistical visualization and visual analysis. It’s won a number of awards and has applications in business intelligence, web analytics, database marketing, university statistics, data analysis, and the occasional FlowingData Visualize This challenge. Also, one of the co-founders was a founding member of Pixar. Need I say more? Take a look at what you can do with Tableau in their Visual Examples section. The Tableau Personal Edition is valued at $999.

How to Enter

This is super easy. First, follow Tableau on Twitter. Second, go to this page. How many days is the Tableau trial version functional for? Send the answer and oh what the heck, your favorite color in an @reply to Tableau on Twitter in the following exact format:

“@tableau @flowingdata 10k giveaway answer: <some number> <favorite color>”

Of course replace <some number> and <favorite color> appropriately. Please only send your answer once, and it has to be via Twitter. Don’t post your answers here. On March 2, a winner of a brand-spankin’ new Tableau Personal Edition will be randomly selected. Good luck!

UPDATE: That’s a wrap! Thanks for participating, everyone.

13 Comments

  • Moritz Stefaner — February 17, 2009 at 6:57 am

    Sure about that @fowingdata without “l”?

  • Nathan Yau — February 17, 2009 at 7:51 am

    yikes. fixed. it should be @flowingdata (with the “l”). no penalty to those who already did w/o the “l”. Sorry for the confusion.

  • Andy Cotgreave — February 17, 2009 at 9:58 am

    I think these giveaways are a great idea.

    At the end of the process, are you going to visualise the competition entries? ie Number of responses by Giveaway, Times of Response, Country of Entrants, etc? I think it’s the least you can do for us :-)

  • Adam — February 17, 2009 at 11:01 am

    I really thought I’d be able to hold out against getting Twitter anytime soon. This contest is likely to prove otherwise. That’s the cost of free I guess.

  • Joe Mako — February 17, 2009 at 6:32 pm

    Nathan,

    Thank you for running this contest. :)

    Have you seen some of the “Amazing Things To Do With Tableau Desktop”: http://www.tableausoftware.com/learning/training/ondemand/amazingthings

    My favorite is the one titled “Analyze a Time Series”

  • Tim — February 18, 2009 at 4:17 am

    hey nathan, did you get my entry? I don’t really know how to use twitter *shame*

    also, my favorite color is puce, which has a sublime connection to pixar. that’s gotta help :)

  • Tommy — February 18, 2009 at 8:42 am

    I have no idea what you’re talking about when you say @reply…… where? how? is there some link that will allow me to type that in? is there a command line interface? this twitter things looks like the silliest thing I’ve seen in a long time! I mean WTF. I am at a complete loss here.

  • Nathan Yau — February 18, 2009 at 8:53 am

    @Tommy – haha, I figured such a response from some of the Twitter beginners. Once you’re logged into Twitter, try following this link. Make sure you fill in the blanks of course.

  • Nathan Yau — February 18, 2009 at 9:17 am

    p.s. make sure you follow tableau on Twitter for your entry to count

  • Tommy — February 18, 2009 at 9:21 am

    OK. I *think* that I have done that properly. There was a text box. I changed what was in the brackets to the values necessary and clicked Update… I hope that was correct! It still makes no sense to me but, hey, thats me I guess.

  • Tim — February 18, 2009 at 5:15 pm

    Nathan, have you got it now? I feel so dumb.

    As a suggestion, you could make it easier with a simple “enter here” form that does all the following and messaging at twitter for us. your.flowingdata knows how so i assume you could repurpose some code.

  • Rasheed — February 19, 2009 at 10:29 am

    Thanks for running the contest! Looking forward to the draw (and any future contests). Well done!!

  • Mike Brown — February 27, 2009 at 6:08 pm

    I wonder what I’ll do with a copy of Tableau.