In today’s fast-paced business environment, ease of integration is extremely important.

It’s a time suck to copy and paste all of your information from one source to another every time you put together a report or a presentation.

Whether you are accommodating clients or creating internal communications, portability can sometimes be an issue.

Transporting data with ease from the Spark platform into your display materials will now be a lot easier.

In addition to the JPEG and Excel spreadsheet export functions that already exist, next week we are rolling out the ability to export text and graphics into PDF and Word documents on two reporting pages:

Insight Explorer (a detail-filled list of relevant URLs) and Excerpt Explorer (excerpts of relevant and overt sentiment).

First, you may want to filter your results page to your exact specifications with the Advanced Options. Only show URLs or comments that match the criteria you select.

You can use the check boxes and the display count options to pick out individual results or you can export unfiltered results if you like.

We hope you enjoy the new options this creates for your business and look forward telling you about more exciting product development that’s just around the corner!

“Where did your company get its name?”

It’s a question we’ve been hearing more often recently, so I thought I’d explain the significance behind Spiral16:

Spiral16 gets its name from the golden ratio – a mathematical constant of approximately 1.6180339887. It is also referred to as the golden mean, golden number and golden section. Expressed as an equation, the ratio looks like this:

Due to its aesthetically pleasing value, the golden ratio has been used since the Renaissance in art. Da Vinci’s the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa are two famous examples. The ratio’s use in architecture dates back as far as the Egyptian pyramids and the Greek Acropolis.

The ratio is directly related to the Fibonacci sequence.

The Fibonacci sequence is an unending series of numbers where each term in the series is defined by the sum of its two predecessors (assuming that 0 precedes the initial number of 1): 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…

If you divide a Fibonacci number by its immediate predecessor, the answer is approximately 1.6180339887. For example: 13/8 = 1.625

In the 18th century, Charles Bonnet discovered that the phyllotaxis (arrangement of leaves, stems, and branches) of plants are usually spirals of two series of the Fibonacci sequence. This natural spiral gives the company the first part of its name.

The numerical ratio is part of the algorithm that drives our virtualization software. So, we lopped off the extended decimals and went with Spiral1.6, which eventually morphed into Spiral16.

And that’s the rest of the story…

On Monday we added a few new features to Spark – something we are constantly doing to improve our product. One feature in particular will be useful for clients interested in organizing the list of pages that contain sentiment (emotion about a particular topic).

Watch this short video blog to see how the new sort features work. One feature I forgot to include: you can export these organized lists into Excel by clicking the icon next to the title ( )

Watch the video in high quality on our YouTube channel.

Want to learn more about Spiral16 and Spark? We have a new set of videos that explain a bit about us and our software.

This two-minute clip introduces you to our company, but we have nine more videos you can watch on our YouTube channel.

If you want to follow us on YouTube then go here.

If you want to be our “fan” on Facebook then go here.

Despite some icky weather in KC, the Spiral16 crew spent a few hours at Lucky Strike Lanes hanging out, eating and being merry on Thursday night. I threw together a short pic/video blog!

(Observe Justin trying to bowl on crutches. It brings the LOLs.)

Happy holidays!

I recently threw an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party with some friends. Proceeds went to local organization Operation Breakthrough.

On a co-worker’s suggestion, I submitted some pics to the USA Today PopCandy blog…

AND WE GOT PUBLISHED!

Check it out here.

Read more about the benefit and how I used Spark to test the effectiveness of our online marketing.

Kansas State University recently fired Ron Prince after two and a half lackluster seasons as head coach.

The firing of both Prince and Washington’s Ty Willingham leaves only four black coaches in the FBS: Turner Gill of Buffalo, Randy Shannon of Miami, Sylvester Croom of Mississippi State and Kevin Sumlin of Houston.

According to a study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida, this is the lowest number of minority coaches in 15 years.

Nearly 40 percent of this Ecosystem is news organizations.

We used our Spark software to do a quick sampling on the reach of the TIDES report. In a few days, Aaron and I pulled in 224 Nodes (Web sites) mentioning the report or Dr. Richard Lapchick (the report’s co-author).

Just by looking at the Relative Insight Scenario Spread – a graph in Spark that organizes sites into categories – you can tell that TIDES and Dr. Lapchick are newsmakers.

Of the 255 Nodes mentioning the report or TIDES, nearly 40 percent of them are news organizations.

Blogs are the most prominent conversational category, with nearly 17 percent of Nodes. If you add in social networks and bookmarking sites, about 19 percent of the Ecosystem consists of these conversational sites.

Another huge chunk of this graph is the Company/Organization category. These Nodes consist of mostly University of Central Florida and TIDES pages.

The Semantic Cloud shows the most frequently used words in an Ecosystem.

In the Semantic Cloud, we can see the most frequently used words in the entire Ecosystem.

This tool helps us understand the language that people are using to talk about a specific topic.

In this case, there are not many surprises. Words associated with diversity, sports, gender and minorities are part of the list.

Also appearing are the words Obama and president – showing that journalists and creators associate this topic closely with the election of the country’s first black president.

In the Virtualization video, you can see a  small cluster of connections in the center of the 3D map. Those Nodes are mostly pages from the University of Central Florida and TIDES.

[MEDIA=4b5e934a]

Only eight Nodes displayed obvious sentiment about the TIDES report.

These “Company/Organization” sites link to each other, and to a few blogs or Web sites.

Most of the Nodes in this Virtualization are from news organizations.

Surprisingly, there was not an overwhelming amount of sentiment related to this topic. Out of the 224 Nodes surveyed, only eight showed any positive or negative reaction to the study.

That’s 3.5 Percent.

In this Ecosystem, the story comes from the amount of news organizations covering TIDES’ report - not necessarily the amount of connections or links between a few influential Nodes.

The timing of the release (just after the election and Prince’s firing at KSU) made this information newsworthy. If the goal in releasing this report was to get exposure and generate discussion… mission accomplished.

Find this type of data for your company by engaging with Spiral16.

Here are five more Spiral16 wallpapers that you can download for your desktop!

Stuart designed some more wallpapers for you to download! Here are five of them. More coming soon!

Click the images to download the full size for your desktop.