Hans Rosling @ TED 2006

Hans Rosling is a professor from Sweden who is an expert in world health, but has pioneered some amazing ways to look at massive amounts of data. I mean truly AMAZING. I can think of at least a dozen uses for this software to help visualize changes over time. Don't let the topic scare you, this is incredible to watch.

The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop.

This video is one of the TED Talks videos from the 2006 TED Conference.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92

Consumer Product Jungle

unaesthetic.net has posted this fantastic high-res image of a grocery store. This is the nightmare of working in consumer products (like I do). The challenge is getting your product to stand out in this jungle and getting the consumers' attention.

This is a different type of infographic. There are no numbers or values, but you still get the message. Consumer products is a hard business.

This is now hanging on the wall in my office. A constant reminder of all the noise that our products must get through to reach a consumer.

Death and Taxes 2008

NEW Death and Taxes infographic for 2008!

It is the 2008 Federal discretionary budget of the United States. is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President's budget request for 2008. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

So this is what the President is asking for, not the final budget. Compare this to the final 2007 discretionary budget from my earlier post.

An interactive Flash version is online at www.thebudgetgraph.com/poster.

Stop Smoking Infographic

Healthbolt.net has a great infographic about how your body reacts to stopping smoking and when it actually starts to recover. It a great combination of a timeline with a description of the symptoms that smoking quitters experience over the period of time.

Information is power, and the understanding of what to expect gives quitters to power to overcome those symptoms. Too many go back to smoking because they didn't understand what they were experiencing was normal.

They had started by selling this as a high-quality poster, but now its available free as an 18MB PDF for anyone to print. Kudos to them to making this availble free to smokers trying to quit everywhere.

Jonathan Harris TED Talks 2007

Jonathan Harris is working on some cool, interesting, fascinating but weird stuff. This is his presentation at TED 2007 about We Are Fine and his new project Universe. You can see this on the TED site here.

Universe is now live at universe.daylife.com, and you can enter a news topic and watch it graphically associate all of the relevant stories in the media about that topic. This would be really cool for consumer products too, but sadly that doesn't exist.

The TED Talks are now available on iTunes as free video podcasts. I've been watching some older ones from 2002-2007.

Evolution of Apple Design

Wow! Have we come that far?!? I remember using the Apple II! The design form has really changed over 30 years (1976 - 2007).

I found this on Guy Kawasaki's Blog, but the original is at www.core77.com

Top Presidential Contributions 1Q

It's early for the 2008 election, but major campaign funding has already started. It will be interesting to see if more money early in the race makes a difference in the outcome.

From washingtonpost.com

The Size of Our World

This is a simple, but great infographic. How big are the planets? How big is our Sun? How small is the Earth? The site shows five different images on increasingly larger scales.

No numbers or measurements. Easy to understand. So simple, yet SO informative.

The Size of Our World

Digg Swarm

If you don't read Digg...shame on you.

For the rest of us, Digg has become an incredibly valuable source of information. But paging through pages of text for something to catch your eye gets old quick.

Digg Swarm was launched in 2006, and I have increasingly used it more and more since then. It has really grown on me. You can watch in real-time stories that get "Dugg" to become more popular. The visual size of the story bubble grows as the story's popularity grows. The yellow dots connected to the story show you who is digging the story, and the size of the yellow dot shows you how important that user is in the Digg universe.

Also, if the same person Diggs two stories, a connecting line is shown to highlight other story bubbles that may interest you. The connecting line between two stories gets thicker as more users Digg the same two stories showing a stronger connection.

Usually I start it up and let it run for a little while before I check it out. That way it has some time to build up some connections and story history. It starts from scratch when you start, so you only see the stories that are Dugg from that point in time and after.

Starbucks vs. McDonalds

Found on the Princeton University website.

This one shows the accelerating takeover of the world by Starbucks and how quickly they are catching up to the reigning king of the hill, McDonalds. It's a few years old (2003) so let's see how they've done since then...

Starbucks: 6,200 locations in 2003. 11,225 in 2007. Almost double!!!

McDonalds: "Over 31,000" in 2003. Still 31,000 in 2007. No growth for McDonalds!

Do you want coffee with that?