Client: Avoid the Dip from IPO Lockups

Avoid the Dip: The Effect of Lockup on Stock Price is a new infographic InfoNewt designed for Wealthfront.

A flood tide of shares is hitting the market in May and June, as a number of the high-profile tech IPOs from the fall emerge from lockup periods, including Jive Software (JIVE), Zynga (ZNGA) and Angie’s List (ANGI).

If you’re one of the employees of the 28 companies whose lockups are expiring in May or June, you’re wondering how to diversify your portfolio and when to sell.

Here’s our research on the question of what to do in the days immediately following the lockup expiration, presented visually to help you see the dip that typically follows the end of the lockup.*

As valuable financial information to many employees of the tech companies going IPO this year, Wealthfront looked back at 254 prior technology company IPOs to chart “The Dip” that consistently have a price dip the first day after the Lockup ends.

Don’t understand what a Lockup is?  That’s explained in the infographic as well.

Thanks to the team at Wealthfront!

How Draw Something Blew Up Without Blowing Up

Now here is a game for everyone! It doesn’t matter how well you can draw, you can just draw and laugh with your friends at your attempts! This app has become very popular and quite quickly, the How Draw Something Blew Up Without Blowing Up infographic from The Next Web (with help from Couchbase) charts the growing trendiness of this game.

Draw Something was downloaded 50 million times in 50 days. Users created billions of drawings, adding 3,000 new pictures every second. On March 21st, OMPOP, the company behind the game, was bought up by Zynga for more than $200 million. On the first weekend in April, I downloaded the game for my first time and was admittedly addicted for 72 hours.

Today, a company called Couchbase gave us the exclusive on an infographic that charts the app’s viral growth. In case you’ve not heard of Couchbase, it’s the platform that enabled the game to keep up with its NoSQL database technology — from 6 database servers to more than 90 — without a second of game downtime. That’s impressive.

The infographic below charts the amount of user data, drawings per second, number of servers used to keep the game up and going and the number of users over 8 weeks of the game’s mind-blowing growth. The only question now is, will the game’s addictive nature keep fans or will they get over it as quickly as I have?

Intended as a quick summary of Draw Something’s growth, and Couchbase’s success in supporting their database expansion needs, this infographic does a good job.  Simple, easy-to-understand visuals, and use of some hand-sketch illustrations to reinforce how Draw Something works.

Some visualizations in the Billions of Drawings section would have been nice to communicate the immense scale of the growth numbers.  Most readers don’t truly grasp the difference between 10 million and 2 billion by just reading the text numbers.

Where the Startup Jobs are

Where the Startup Jobs are infographic from StartUphire.com aims to help raise awareness of the lack of qualified people filling technical positions in startups.

StartUpHire, with support from the National Venture Capital Association, is releasing a new infographic today depicting 2011 hiring data for startups.  What’s the biggest take away? While most of the country is still sluggish on job creation, startups face the opposite problem- a glut of open technical jobs.

36 percent of all open jobs at startups last year were engineering or technical jobs. However, those two sectors saw only 15 percent of the overall applicant pool trying to fill those positions.  This supports evidence of an ever-tightening market for specific skills out there, and the need to keep developing and attracting qualified talent to young startup companies remains critical.

I think if the country wants to know who holds the best hope for meaningful economic growth, we need look no further than our own home grown, innovative, and passionate startup ecosystem.

This is an interesting story to tell, and an infographic is a great way to do it.  In a down economy with higher unemployment, there are certain job sectors that still aren’t getting enough qualified candidates!

Obviously, everyone assumes there are startup jobs in California (in Silicon Valley), but the map clearly shows startup positions that have been filled across the country.  Visually, the size of the state callout boxes and text seems to imply how big the numbers or for each state; however, that’s not the case and it’s misleading the reader.  Massachusetts had a higher number of job posts than Texas, but the callout text is much smaller.

The circle sizes in Job Posts by Industry appear accurate, which is where many designs make mistakes.  I also like the Areas of Expertise chart, and how the positions are arranged along the X-axis in order of the disparity between open positions and the number of applicants.  That conveys an additional level of information to the reader.

I was disappointed to see the last couple of statistics in the design didn’t get the data visualization treatment.  Show a visualization of 27% and give the 502 number some visual context to show how big that number actually is.  The URL for the original infographic is included at the bottom, but there should also be a copyright statement in the design.

Thanks to Robin for sending in the link!

Rock of Ages: The Evolution of SxSW

Rock of Ages: The Evolution of SxSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad is a new infographic from Rocksauce Studios just in time for SxSW 2012 this weekend.

Since 1987, SXSW has morphed into an interactive, film and music conference and festival that brought together 19,364 attendees in 2011.

Austin-based app development firm, Rocksauce Studios, has created an infographic that dissects the interactive portion of SXSW, and proves why this conference is the new popular techie playground.  

The topics and cited statistics covered in “The Evolution of SXSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad” include:

- History of SXSW
- 2011 Attendance Demographics
- Top 10 Types of Business of Interactive Registrants  
- Geographic Breakdown of Total Interactive Registrants
- Successful SXSW Startup Launches
- Recent SXSW Web Awards  / Interactive Awards Winners
- Reasons So Many Companies Chose to Launch at SXSW
- The Accelerator

You can read more about the development of the infographic on Silicon Angle

This design does a really good job with the visual basics.  Showing the icons/logos of the startup companies, illustrating the business types, mapping the conference registrants. The overall design tells a good story top-to-bottom to the readers, and it’s easy to follow the flow of information.

Three things stood out to me that could be improved:

• There are a lot of data values in the text of the timeline that should have been visualized.
• The three shapes showing the amount of Interactive Conference Participants, Conference Sessions and Interactive Media in Attendance all of different values, but the shapes are not sized to match those values.
• The last section “The Accelerator” seems to fall apart as all text, even though there are some good data values there that should have been visualized.

Thanks to Kelly for sending in the link!

The Entrepreneur's Visual Guide to Tech Startups

HackFwd is a European tech investment firm, and they posted this flowchart on their front page to help startup companies see what it’s like to work with them.

We’re experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and invest in Europe’s most passionate geeks. We’re a pre-seed investment company designed to enable great people to launch great ideas. Our start-up and support process accelerates the route to beta, profitability, and success.

We want you to feel good at every step along the way. Here’s how your experience might look:

Apply-Rinse-Repeat

Found on FlowingData.com