Remastered – A Visibly Smart production from Intel from jotta on Vimeo.

The following interview with Jason Fried from 37signals was featured on http://thestartupfoundry.com/ where he discusses, “Why you can’t actually work at work”.

37signals are a small web application company based in Chicago, their products include Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise are used by millions and written with the framework they created Ruby on Rails.

Random Facebook stencil graffiti

Letters sculptures at Kunsthaus Tacheles

The artist and the painting Kunsthaus Tacheles

Friends

Internet Explorer

Mozilla Firefox

Chrome

Safari

Opera

3,892,179,868,480,350,000,000 or more simply put 3 sextillion, 892 quintillion, 179 quadrillion, 868 trillion, 480 billion, 350 million is the number of new digital information bits created in 2008 according to EMC Corporation. This figure calculates to 487 billion gigabytes, with EMC Corporation predicting that these figures will increase by five times in 2012.

The vast increase in the amount of data being generated, is down to the emergence of the “Internet of Things”, literally a device connected to the Internet or as Google’s Marissa Mayer defines as “Ubiquitous nano-sensors”. These devices are producing increasing amounts of data about the behaviour of the user interacting with the internet and the environment in which they’re doing so. So there’s a lot of data out there to visualise.

The process of creating a data visualisation starts with a question and meanders its way to construct a story that provides a clear answer to our question. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll briefly outline the 7 stages involved in creating a data visualisation.

Acquire
The first stage involves gathering some data and depending on your question this can be simple process or rather complex. Numerous public data sets are available for download on the web e.g. the Humane Genome (150 Gigabytes) or Weather measurements 1929-2009 (20 Gigabytes) are available from Amazon.

Parse
The data, which has been acquired, needs to be converted into its most useful format. This will involve tagging each individual piece of information for its intended use.

Filter
Once the data has been parsed, it will then need to be sorted so that any data not relevant is removed and/or normalised. This way all values are converted into a useful range.

Mine
The next step involves mining the data with math and statistics in order to extract a pattern that will form the basis of the story that will be visualised.

Represent
Within this stage the decision is made to the form that best suits the data. This could be a horizon graph, coloured circled placed on a map, or even a simple bar chart.

Refine
The decision made at the previous stage will influence refinement stage, where graphic design is added to help exemplify the changes in particular data. For instance, the coloured circles placed on a map could be transformed into particle clouds above the map, with denser areas representing areas of higher value.

Interact
The final stage adds interaction to the visualisation so that the user is able to control and explore the data. This can be as complex as filtering the data to create a new representation or just zooming in and out.

Here are a few interesting examples of data visualisation:
- Night vision maps of the WikiLeaks Iraq Casualty Data
- Cities from around the world traced using geotags and timestamps from Flickr and Picasa to determine the speed at which photographers traveled the landscape
- NetFlix rental patterns examined, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, in a various American cities
- The 372 songs sampled in All Day by the band Girl Talk visualised
- Flowing Data will visualise data about your environment, lifestyle and yourself using Twitter

Data visualisation has the ability to convey an insightful piece of information in an imaginative way, be in it print, web or even mobile. Marry this with a flashy or simple design and data visualisation can be an effective way to communicate a branded message.

Puente del Alamillo

Plaza de Toros La Malagueta

Bar Europa

Probably the best Tapas restaurant in Seville

Óscar Freire

An untended portrait of three road race World Champion Óscar Freire

Philip Gilbert continues to attack 150 meters from the finish in Malaga Stage 3.

The Xacobeo-Galicia team exit the final corner of cobblestones in Triana during 2010 Vuelta a España, Stage 1: Sevile – Seville Team time trial.

The Team Sky warm up in Triana during 2010 Vuelta a España, Stage 1: Sevile – Seville Team time trial.

Francaise Des Jeux team ride along the cobblestones in Triana during 2010 Vuelta a España, Stage 1: Sevile – Seville Team time trial.

The flash team recently went along to the Adobe Creative Suite 5 launch party to learn about some of the new features we can look forward to in Flash Player 10.1.

One of the common moans users have about Flash Player is the affect it has upon their computer’s processors which results in their laptop battery being drained. Flash Player is based upon a frame rate, and the frame rate determines how many times code is executed per second. Imagine if you have your web browser open with 10 tabs of the same Flash movie running. Even though you can only see one tab, all 10 Flash movies would be running at say 31fps, subsequently draining your laptop battery. Now with Flash Player 10.1 the player automatically detects whether a Flash movie is hidden in a tab and automatically reduces its frame rate to 2fps.

When working with just English it is easy to overlook how different languages display text information. For instance Japanese text is read vertically, while Arabic text is read from right to left. Previously this would require a clever code, however the text engine in Flash Player 10.1 has been vastly improved, adding the ability to change the direction and orientation of text.

Recent releases of Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer added ‘private browsing mode’, which when activated, enables the user to browse the Internet knowing that any data about sites and pages they have visited will not be saved by their web browser. Flash Player 10.1 now automatically checks and adjusts to the web browser’s ‘private browsing mode’, so any Local Shared Objects which can store information about a user’s visits in Flash sites will not be remembered when private browsing is turned off.

Finally, have you ever been watching a piece of full screen video when after a couple of minutes your screensaver appears? Flash Player 10.1 now has the ability to disable your screensaver whilst your video is playing or buffering. Great stuff.


private function displayListSnapper(container:DisplayObjectContainer, round:Boolean, debug:Boolean, indent:String = ""):void
{
var child:DisplayObject;
for (var i:uint=0; i < container.numChildren; i++)
{
child = container.getChildAt(i);

if (container.getChildAt(i) is DisplayObjectContainer)
{
roundDisplayList(DisplayObjectContainer(child), round, debug, indent + "^^^")
}
}
}