At Augaroo, big data you can see and touch

Justin Langseth has been working to collect, manipulate and make sense of big data since before the term became mainstream vernacular in tech circles.

Stretching back to the mid-1990s, Langseth has carried the chief technology officer title at three firms that built businesses on helping others to digest the large volumes of information that flow to their servers.

Now Langseth has formed his own venture, called Augaroo, that aims to help companies make sense of that information through data visualization. The company's main product in development, called ZoomData, would allow businesses to create and toy with charts and graphics that depict their data on iPads and other Web-enabled devices.

"There seemed to be a gap in the market that I noticed in terms of there wasn't really an ability to create interactive and real-time data analysis," Langseth said in a phone interview from Odessa, Ukraine, where he was visiting the firm's team of developers.

The idea garnered Langseth top honors at a TechBuzz competition in May, where 28 upstarts pitched to a room of investors. Augaroo was named Best of the Buzz, and Langseth said the company could finalize an initial round of venture funding this summer.

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