'Know your clients, give them what they need'

Ingelmo: "Clients don't want to wait three hours for a graphic."

Manuel Benito Ingelmo has blended his knowledge of data, technology, and journalism to establish a news service with some of the biggest media in Spain as his clients.

His data-visualization service, Porcentual.es, just finished its most successful year, and Ingelmo continues to innovate and improve his products.

He and a team of two programmers have developed software that pulls data from public databases and produces graphics in minutes for media organizations to embed in their web pages. They can also customize the data geographically so that a newspaper in the city of Seville, for example, can get the latest unemployment figures for its area.

"We're very fast," Ingelmo says. "Speed matters. Our clients don't want to wait three hours for a graphic. They want it right now," he told me recently in a Skype interview from his home in Vitoria, northern Spain.