Today, we’ll take a look at the history of Apple, Microsoft and MySpace, with the help of Online MBA, Trainsignal Training and Paid Content respectively – and talk about different paths! Also, from Intuit comes an insightful look at where are small business making a comeback in America, and still some 2011 predictions, this time for retail, presented by the folks at Savings.
HDTV Magazine has an article from Alfred Poor about the many Autostereoscopic 3D televisions on display at CES2011 this year. He starts off showing how he believes the “multi-view” angle televisions will fail due to the “cuddle factor”, basically explaining how the multi-view is still highly depending on specific viewing angles.
But then he gets into a fascinating new theory on why he believes 3D Televisions may be selling so poorly in the marketplace, and that there’s no one to blame but the television industry itself.
And this leads me to the larger point. I think that the television manufacturers are making a dreadful mistake by making these public “technology demonstrations.” There once was a company named Osborne that made one of the first portable computers. It announced that it was going to ship a second generation model, and everyone stopped buying the first model. The production date slipped, Kaypro and Compaq came to market with better models, and Osborne never recovered. I believe that something similar is happening with no-glasses 3DTVs. I’ve heard from lots of consumers that they do not want to wear 3D glasses of any sort. “They’re showing no-glasses 3DTVs; I’m just going to wait until they have that working.” I’ve heard this repeatedly
via HDTV Magazine – HDTV Almanac – CES 2011: Are TV Makers Doing an “Osborne”?.
Mike Vizard has a piece in CTOEdge that shows just how easily you can miss the mark on a press release. He starts off with the recent comments from NVidia’s Sumit Gupta about NVidia making a play for HPC with new Tesla and Project Denver designs.
What’s about to change, however, is that access to graphical processing units (GPUs) is about to get a whole lot less expensive thanks to cloud computing services. What that means, says Sumit Gupta, who heads up product management and marketing for Nvidia’s Tesla products, is that mainstream enterprise software, such as business intelligence applications, will be embedding visually-oriented analytics that will be processed in the cloud.
Then he goes on about how in the future you’ll be able to use the cloud of video encoding and gaming.
The real power behind NVidia’s argument is in the growing mountains of data. Data that used to be easily visualized with a simple Bar Chart or Line Graph has grown beyond the ability of simple Windows Graphics to render with any usefulness. You now need more advanced visualization methods like Treemaps and Heatmaps, not to mention Edge Bundles and network graphs. These algorithms generally require hardware acceleration (if not require, then benefit greatly from) due to the complex nature of the computations involved (Edge bundles) or the difficulty in rendering (heatmaps).
Just imagine if Google or Tableau extended their charting ability to include iRay-style visuals (resolution-varying streamed rendering) of massive datasets.
The size of the internet…now, that’s a big question! The folks at The Next Web managed to put it into perspective, with some amazing numbers. From Techking comes everything you need to know about Social Networks, and, again from The Next Web, a breakdown of how people post to Twitter. Brian Solis and JESS3 released a new version of the Social Compass – still one of the references when it comes to brand management in this brave new Social Media World – and we finish with Clicker‘s look at the Ad Wars, or should we call it TV vs. Internet?
Following in the footsteps of Alark Joshi’s ‘Seminal Information Visualization Papers‘ article, Enrico Bertini has published a nice list of 7 fondational Viz Papers.
Of course this doesn’t mean these are the only ones you should read if you want to dig into this matter. Some other papers are foundational as well. For sure a side effect of the maturation of this field is that some newer papers are more solid and deep and I had to refrain myself to not include them in the list. But this is a collection of classics. A list of papers you just cannot avoid to know unless you want to risk a bad impression at VisWeek (ok ok it’s a joke … but there’s a pinch of truth in it). A retrospective. Definitely a must read. Call me nostalgic.
He’s got the famous ‘How NOT to Lie with Visualization’ in there, and for each paper breaks down what’s in it, why it’s important, and what you can expect to learn. He has PDF links as well, making it perfect for all us Evernote types.
Equalizer, the somewhat next-generation of the massive tiled display system Chromium, has just hit version 1.0 alpha and added a nice API and SDK system called ‘Collage’.
The most notable new features in this release are:
- Full feature set and API of Equalizer 1.0
- GPU compression plugins
- Failure tolerance during initialization
- Administrative API for runtime configuration changes (preview)
Intended primarily for application developers, it’s a great API for creating massively parallel OpenGL applications.
via Equalizer: News: Equalizer 1.0-alpha delivers scalability and flexibility for OpenGL applications.
Diamonds are a girl’s best friends, so they say, and Online Dating made an infographic that seems to prove it! But if we’re speaking about the Human Being, there’s no question that dogs are on the top of the best-friends list, and Pet Deals Now have put together some facts about dogs in America. After that, we bring a couple of graphics for film lovers: the Sequel Map from Box Office Quant and an awesome illustration from Corridor Digital, guiding everyone who’s planning to shoot a perfect action scene. Our last pick of the week goes to Travel Insurance‘s Beer Tours of America – after all, today’s Happy Hour day!!
Following up today’s earlier post on the visualization of the Forbes Billionaire’s list, Macrofocus has created an interactive treemap that you can use on their site.
Based on the annual ranking of the individual fortunes in the world with a net worth above $1 billion compiled by Forbes magazine, we created a dataset that can directly be loaded into TreeMap. It contains information about their citizenship and residence, as well as their age and of course net worth (in $ billions).
Hit their site where you can download the dataset for viewing offline, or view it with therir online Java applet.
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