Data visualization

Nice Foursquare infographic

February 2, 2011

I love Foursquare and I *really* love infographics, so big thanks to Tamara for pointing me towards this nice set of charts summarising activity on Foursquare across 2010. There’s a ton of information here, but I particularly like this depiction of activity on Foursquare by category across a day.  No big surprises – people check [...]

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Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?

March 22, 2010

Thanks to the wonderful Valerie Casey of the Designers Accord for showcasing this fab infographic at her SXSW keynote.  The graphic featured in the New York Times earlier this month. I’m sure the truth is a little more complicated, but all the same this graphic really makes a powerful case… Share: Recommend on Facebook Tweet [...]

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Nokia Money is a potential game changer

September 1, 2009

One definition of the shallowness of the modern world is that the focus at this week’s Nokia World conference will no doubt be on which handsets Nokia releases and whether or not they have an iphone beater tucked up their Nordic sleeves. But more interesting than all this hardware is the pre-announcement last week of [...]

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What does your email address say about you?

August 27, 2009

I’ve recently been playing with Wolfram Alpha, which pulls in some great statistical information when you search on a first name, including the age distribution of the name and the average age of people with a particular name. All this makes me think that you could make some pretty reasonable assumptions based purely on a [...]

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Firefox grows European market share, whilst UK lags behind

June 30, 2009

Today’s launch of Firefox 3.5 is the latest shot in the long struggle for domination in the browser market.  The data below – from AT Internet Institute – shows that Firefox has steadily been growing its market share in Europe, mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer.  Disappointingly for Microsoft, Internet Explorer’s market share actually [...]

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Google’s Eurovision predictor

May 14, 2009

Google has turned its gaze away from worthy goals like predicting the spread of flu to more challenging tasks like forecasting the winner of this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. Like the flu prediction service, Google is studying search trends on particular keywords to come to its conclusions.  It excludes searches from a contestants own country, [...]

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Wisdom of crowds says Liverpool will beat Fulham

April 3, 2009

The Guardian has been running a regular feature where readers choose a bet on a sporting event and compete against a betting expert and a former sportsman.  This week for instance you can choose a bet for Fulham vs Liverpool on Saturday (with the people opting for a Liverpool win). The running total is a [...]

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Invasion of the aggregators

March 12, 2009

I’ve published my slides from a presentation I gave yesterday at the Financial Services Forum looking at the impact of insurance aggregators from a search/media perspective. Most surprising thing for me was the rise in searches for the term “compare car insurance” alongside a down trend for “cheap car insurance”.  The rise of aggregators like [...]

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UK lags behind in consumer and business IT performance

February 25, 2009

The Connectivity Scorecard is an interesting piece of research, looking not just at levels of connectivity in major economies, but also at how “usefully connected” economies are. Useful connectivity is “connectivity that contributes to economic growth, especially through improvements to productivity”.  So an economy like South Korea has of course excellent consumer access to the [...]

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Rise of the info shopper

January 27, 2009

 There’s an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal (flagged up in Internet Retailing) on some new research showing the growing importance of the ‘info shopper’. Basically this is someone who is reluctant to make a purchase offline without thoroughly researching it online. The research suggests that this ‘research-first’ mentality is creeping into an ever-broader [...]

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