An In-Depth Look At Pivot, Microsoft’s Newest Data Visualization Tool

At Microsoft's PDC event a few weeks ago, Microsoft Live Labs introduced a new technology, called Pivot, to make sense of interconnectedness between objects on the web. The underlying premise of Pivot is to view relationships between "collections" of individual information on the the web. Many of the connections between items on the web aren't necessarily tangible, but Pivot helps crawl massive amount of objects on the web and produces sleek visualizations of all that is connected. We sat down with Microsoft developer Gary Flake, who created Pivot, and Microsoft evangelist Brandon Watson to take an in-depth look at the application. While Pivot is currently in private beta, we have 500 invites for TechCrunch readers who use the code "16FC 2946 0C4C 4CCB" when downloading the app here. Pivot is itself a standalone application, but it relies heavily on Internet Explorer's rendering engine. The best way to understand the importance of Pivot is through a real-world example of how this technology would work. So let's say I wanted a visualization of all the Wikipedia links to TechCrunch, Pivot would essentially crawl all of Wikipedia and create a map of the Wikipedia pages that are connected to TechCrunch, such as Michael Arrington's Wikipedia page.