Data Intelligence Without Programming

Background History

Nanosai is a startup project launched in January 2015 as a joint venture collaboration between UK based Zaiku Group and Denmark based Jenkov Aps. The goal of the project back then was to create a reactive backend as a service platform which was more coherent, consistent and focused than what we were getting back with Google App Engine and AWS.

Nanosai founders (right to left) in Copenhagen: Jakob Jenkov, Bamborde Balde and Liam Shore.

To create a more coherent platform we realized that we had to reinvent several of the technologies we wanted to offer, and the technologies to support that, including data formats, network protocols and application platform. However, as the project evolved we felt the need to narrow our focus from just general SaaS / IaaS to focus on creating a “Data Intelligence Ecosystem”. Most of the underlying ideas and technologies are the same, though.

About Nanosai Studio

Nanosai Studio is a general purpose data intelligence desktop application that can be connected to a data source and analyze + visualize the data in a variety of ways. The application requests the latest data from the data source at regular intervals, so you can see the data analyzed and visualized in realtime.

Being a desktop application, Nanosai Studio can use local files as data sources, or local development web servers. It can also be connected to your own infrastructure via HTTP to obtain the data. You just need to provide a web service that returns the data in the correct format.

It only takes a few clicks to configure a data view and connect it to a data source. Multiple data views can be grouped together into a live updating dashboard. The configuration of dashboards can be saved to disk, so you can re-open that configuration again in the future. If you upload the dashboard configuration file to a web server, the configuration can be shared with other users. When they open the dashboard configuration file they get a dashboard with the same data views and data sources used to create the configuration.

Finally, Nanosai Studio can also use Nanosai Streams as data source — in case you do not want to use your own infrastructure for the data. Nanosai Streams is like a simplified version of Kafka, hosted by Nanosai.

Posted by Bambordé Baldé, Co — Founder | Twitter: @cloudbalde | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bambordé|

Data Intelligence Without Programming was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.