Posted in visualization on Jan 14th, 2008
I guess even the guys who live and breathe data get lost in it sometimes.
At one power company that enlisted the help of Houston-area Visual Numerics, there was so much data that no one knew how to start pulling it apart. Only when company analysts saw it visualized did they know what questions to ask.
Marketing [...]
I’ve read about an 84-year-old farmer in North Dakota who reads pig spleens the way mainstream fortune tellers read tarot. Sadly, he doesn’t service the business intelligence industry.
Posted in trends on Dec 19th, 2007
Events and Trends: A Conversation About 2007 and 2008 (12/19/2007)
Acquisitions of pure-play BI vendors was the big story, but the meaning will play out in 2008. How will the smaller vendors find a place in the new ecosystem?
Posted in in media, visualization on Dec 6th, 2007
Today’s Wall Street Journal Online uses tag clouds—the first I’ve seen on that site—to compare Mitt Romney’s statement on religion with John F. Kennedy’s statement in the fall of 1960 as he ran for president.
It’s great to see the Wall Street Journal getting into information visualization (a.k.a. “infovis” among aficionados).
No big story has popped out [...]
Posted in visualization on Dec 3rd, 2007
It’s not the kind of visualization we’ve been talking about, but it works. This brief video on YouTube makes carbon dioxide more than visible. The CO2 becomes scary.
Posted in infovis on Nov 27th, 2007
That winery of mid-’60s TV fame Italian Swiss Colony and its mascot “that little old winemaker, me” often seems to apply in surprising places.
A few weeks ago at a visualization conference, the business intelligence community’s leader in visualization design, Stephen Few <>, told the room full of dedicated visualizers to be more useful. Some took exception.
Posted in visualization on Nov 21st, 2007
I attended the IEEE InfoVIS 2007 conference in Sacramento, held October 28-30, and wrote about it for TDWI: “Visualization: Just Look What’s Coming.”
Posted in culture on Oct 31st, 2007
This afternoon the geeks and the grad students who drove the IEEE InfoVIS (information visualization) conference with their clever but mostly useless inventions swarmed into the hotel lobby for some reason that only their well-wired brains understand. They are a different crowd from the one I’ve seen lately.
This year I’ve only been to business [...]
Posted in muses on Aug 7th, 2007
Imagine an executive walking around with a “dashboard” on his head. It looks like a pair of sporty sunglasses, but it does much more. Whereever he turns his head, pop-up windows tell him what he’s looking at. He doesn’t even have to ask “What’s going on in that cubicle?”
Detailed background on everyone from [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 27th, 2007
After about three quarters of an oatmeal stout, my old friend Sam the BI developer wondered aloud, “What is the ideal dashboard?” There was no need to call Steve Few or Edward Tufte. I had the answer right away. (I had been sipping an oatmeal stout myself.)