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US iPad Users are Overpaying for their Data Plans
iPad users in the US are being ripped off. This visualization shows that US users pay some of the highest prices in the world (by $/GB) for their monthly data plans. Click around and explore to see who has the best (and worst!) data rates worldwide.
Small, dense countries like Hong Kong and Singapore manage to offer plans at less than 1/20th the cost (per gigabyte) in the US. Apples to oranges perhaps, but even the UK manages to offer plans for 1/5th the cost. This is even more frustrating given that the majority of iPad users are in the US. Don't we get a volume discount?
On the other hand, French iPad users are paying $25 a GB minimum. Maybe we shouldn't complain...
Dr. Who Villain Motives
The long-running BBC series Dr. Who is one of the most popular science fiction shows of all time. Myraid are its fans, and as you can see from this visualization, its villains. Whether they are looking to invade the earth, drink blood or just kill the Doctor, rest assured you will be entertained. Thanks to the Guardian Datablog for the data.
If you select any of the motives on the top, you will see the bottom view filter down to a list of villains which had that motive. You will also see that some motives are connected to other motives. This is because some villains have multiple motives in a given episode, like killing everything and world domination. Talk about multi-tasking!
Supercharged Road Trip Photo Album
After taking a road trip, most people are less than eager to develop their photos (or download them). A select few may download them and post them to their blog or flickr. But only Dave Ward has used Tableau Public to create an interactive "see what I saw when I was here" app. Click into the image below to link out to the live viz.
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How'd he do that- Photo album
This is not as hard as it is awesome. First, Dave created a webpage for each day of his roadtrip with the images and text he wanted to show for each one. Most importantly, he edited their urls to follow a predictable pattern. In other words, the page with photos of Day 1 is http://dwboygenius.com.../myroadtrip/1. That way, he could write the hyperlink action as http://dwboygenius.com.../myroadtrip/Day, so it updates with each click. This makes me want to take a road trip.
The top 100 Tableau Public Visualizations
In the first six months of this year Tableau Public visualizations were viewed 4.5 million times. Of course, this statistic reflects upon the amazing authors that continually post content to Public. In honor of those authors and to celebrate the success of Tableau Public, we have made the visualization below, showing the top 100 Tableau Public views by traffic. Take a look and as always, interact!
Good data visualization is egalitarian. As you can see from the scatterplot below, there is no correlation between rank by traffic and interactivity. In other words, whether your blog has 3 subscribers or 30,000, you can engage your audience with interactive visualizations and they will respond.
These authors are early adopters on the forefront of telling stories with live, interactive data. At the very least, they have shown us all that interactive visualizations are no longer the sole domain of The New York Times.
Facebook Adoption Worldwide
Remember the innocent, students-only Facebook of 2005? Without pictures, without video... without Mom? Well, judging from this visualization, those youthful days are long gone. The Facebook that we have today is an international force, with half a billion members, thousands of apps and an increasing volume of functionality. Take a look at this viz to see how popular Facebook is in your neck of the woods.
Despite Facebook's phenomenal success, there are still over 200M people in North America who have yet to join. Universal adoption is nearly impossible, but there is clearly room for growth. Outside of North America and Europe, the story is entirely different. Massive populations in India, Brazil and Indonesia have yet to be swayed into the Facebook camp, partly due to the popularity of other sites, like Google's Orkut. These people will decide whether Facebook goes global, or remains a club of the English speaking world.
Thanks to Robert Morton for the visualization.
Zynga Games & Tableau Featured in TDWI Article About Zynga's Massive Analytics Strategy
Today Linda Briggs over at TDWI posted an article, Q&A: Zynga Stresses Visual Access to Its Vast Data Volumes, about her Q&A session with Ken Rudin, Director of Analytics for Zynga Games. Ken has a deep analytics background and is well-known in the business intelligence world.
Now in his capacity with Zynga, he has an incredibly interesting environment to solve a key strategic task - he's got Tableau on top of one of the world's largest data warehouses (which happens to be built by Vertica) to help the Zynga team make their games even more successful. They're probably most well-known for their Facebook games like Farmville (personally, I'm a huge fan of Scramble on the iPhone).
In his interview with Linda, Ken makes it clear that doing analysis on top of a massive data warehouse is just the beginning. One of my favorite quotes is "if you're doing analysis, you might be generating fantastic insights, but if you distribute your results to people and they aren't able to understand it, they won't actually do anything differently.“
In fact, Ken goes on to say a lot of great things, particularly about Tableau. See below for a few more. Clearly, Tableau with Vertica is rapid-fire BI at its best.
- “Tableau makes it easy to uncover insights, and then picks the best way to present them visually so they can be easily understood. We can now put the data out there and I don't have to go and talk to 250 people individually to explain it to them. An intuitive chart does it for me.“
- “Many of the other tools we looked at required you to either work with just a subset of the data or pull a full copy of the data into its own local storage. With the first approach, you don't get all the data, and due to our data size, the second approach wasn't feasible. Tableau is one of the few that goes back to the source, the main database itself, when you issue a query, versus having to pull over a cube.“
- “Tableau has all the analysis we need... I'd rather have good analytics and great communication than great analytics and poor communication because in the latter case, you get nothing out of it. I don't mean to imply that Tableau is at all weak on the analytics part of it. They do everything we need and more.“
- “Tableau is a great tool that allows you to tell great stories...“
- “(Tableau) makes it much easier to get people to act. My fundamental philosophy is, if you're doing analysis, you might be generating fantastic insights, but if you distribute your results to people and they aren't able to understand it, they won't actually do anything differently.“
- “Using Tableau, we show people what needs to change and what the outcome is going to be. It's all there... “
10 New Vizes - On the Lighter Side of BI
From "Highest Grossing Movies" and "The Greatest Basketball Players of All Time" to "Mobile Network Data Performance" and "History of the World Cup", check out our visual news stories.
Tableau's Momentum Is Building
Things are cooking here at Tableau - and it's not just because summer in Seattle has finally arrived.
This morning we released information about our growth. Bottom line is that in the first 6 months of 2010, we've more than doubled sales (compared to the first half 2009), introduced Tableau Public - a highly visible and widely adopted product that changes how people show and share data on the web, won a spate of awards, and hired bunches of great people. These all are exciting developments for us - ones that have had our CEO Christian Chabot confident in proclaiming "it is not a leap of the imagination to consider that Tableau is Seattle's next billion dollar software company."
And to top it off, yesterday Microsoft at the keynote speech for its 15,000 person Worldwide Partner Conference, demoed Tableau. Don Farmer called Tableau "one of our leading business intelligence partners". That's nice recognition from a much bigger player in our own backyard.
See what people are writing about our growth:
- From TechFlash: Tableau Software grows like 'gangbusters,' plans to hire 150
- From the Seattle Times: Tableau Software doubles sales, hiring 100
And check out Donald Farmer's demo here: 
The demo of Tableau starts at 01:43:20.
Congestion and Public Transit Use
Traffic is the enemy of nearly every city dwelling American. Efforts to promote "green" commutes and reduce congestion have attracted significant attention for years, but one only has to commute home to see how effective they have been. This visualization shows that every major city in the US has suffered increased congestion in the years since 1982. Click on your hometown in the list below to see how public transit ridership and congestion have changed over time.
In this view, the blue "worms" represent cities grouped by population (large, medium, etc). The line gets darker as time goes on. In this view, small cities have a line creeping up and to the left, so they are experiencing lower per capita public transit ridership and more congestion.
It's not that cities are reducing public transit options, there is just no way that static infrastructure can cope with the massive population increases seen in most American cities (especially the smaller ones). Either populations will have to decrease, or infrastructure and public transit spending will have to massively increase.
How'd they do that?
Scatter plot spark lines: The "worms" seen here are a quick and easy way to show how values change over time. Simply put your time value on the Path shelf, and the category you want to separate your fields with on the Level of Detail, Text or Color shelves, as shown below (Population Group). Provided you have two measures on Columns and Rows as in all scatters, you should be off and running!
Active Building Permits in Seattle
The housing boom may be bust, but Seattle is still bustling with active building permits. Robert Morton found this data at data.seattle.gov, the City of Seattle's public data repository. Using his viz, you can see permits going back several years. What's going on in your neighborhood?
For me, this data brings up questions about the City of Seattle permit process. For instance, dozens of buildings downtown (I am assuming commercial spaces), have a "blanket permit for interior non-structural alterations - Administrative permit only- no work authorized". So, why issue a permit that cannot be used for anything? I am sure there is a good reason, I just can't figure it out.
