Bloom.io Raises Funding for Playful Data Visualization

Bloom.io today announced it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Betaworks, SV Angel and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

The San Francisco-based company–which has already made some basic demo apps to show Facebook and Twitter updates as a series of pretty blooming bubbles–says it will make data visualization applications for iOS and the Web to help users discover personally relevant information, streaming audio and video content.

Bloom’s team comes from Stamen Design, Trulia and The Barbarian Group. Bloom President Ben Cerveny told NetworkEffect that the company’s first apps will be for the iPad, introducing different metaphors such as space travel or sand in a sandbox for ambient and active views of social media data.

Cerveny calls these “post-textual experiences,” and you can imagine a big, trippy personalized screensaver or social playlist on your tablet.

Bloom promises that its apps “aren’t merely games or graphics,” but rather “new ways of seeing what’s important.”