something in the way

iPhone Fireflies: Mapping the Movements of iPhones in Europe

As it has become known that iPhones are continuously tracking and recording one's geographic location, a few organizations have tried to make good use of this revelation, in particular by collecting, aggregating and visualizing these itineraries for anyone who wishes to share this data.

The latest visualization result made by Michael Kreil is remarkable due to its use of a nicely animated heatmap of sorts. In the movie, shown below (crank up the resolution!), the movements of 880 different iPhones in Europe have been analyzed for the month of April 2011.

The result looks like a hive of fireflies, pulsing in and out (to denote the loss of data during the night as phones tend to be turned off), and flying around, in and out of their favorite locations. The animations have been calculated based on real data, or by estimating the routes between known locations.

Feb 3

Geckoboard Real-Time Online Status Dashboard has Launched

Geckoboard [geckoboard.com] is a status board that centralizes and shows various real-time vital data in a single place, including web analytics, CRM, support, infrastructure, project management, and sales. Or, put in other words: Geckoboard is a wet dream coming true for any data addict with an open, semi-public office and a spare screen laying around. In fact, because the interface is online and modular, it can be show on a wide variety of screens, ranging from a 60" monitor to an iPad or smart phone.

As an early beta tester, I can attest its ease of use: the interface configuration works around choosing and setting up a set of predefined widgets, that hook into the most popular online APIs, such as Basecamp (Project Management), ChartBeat (Web Analytics), email ( IMAP/POP, Gmail, Google Apps Email), Get Satisfaction (Customer Service), Google Analytics (Web Analytics), RSS Feeds. Text (Custom Alerts and Messages), Twitter (Social Media), and many more.

Also on TechCrunch.

Jan 4

Track and Visualize Personal Statistics with the New Daytum Iphone App

For those still in need for a personal resolution... Personal statistics aggregator Daytum, originally conceived by 'personal-year-report-designer' Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case, has just released a dedicated iPhone app [daytum.com, direct iTunes link] to make tracking your daily activities that much simpler and easier.

The app allows creating, tracking and exploring individual categories (e.g. to capture your weight to when, how much, and what brand you choose when you drink coffee), while also offering some nice interactive line graphs to get an overview of any historical trends.

While the app itself is free, Daytum itself offers both a free account, and a $4/month "unlimited" account for those who wish to have access to additional features including the ability to collect and present more data, create pages and apply privacy settings to their account.

How does it compare to other self-tracking iPhone apps, out there?

Via Cool Hunting.

May 25

Patients Like Me: Share Disease Treatment and Symptom Information

Patients Like Me [patientslikeme.com] seems like the most useful example of the combination of sophisticated data visualization and online social media. It demonstrates the power of the social aggregation of data, and the tilting equilibrium between privacy and value creation for people who crave to access valuable information about their own faith.

The first, almost obvious, feature allows people with a life-changing disease (e.g. ALS, HIV, Parkinson's, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, MS) to connect to others in the same situation, for instance to learn how they treat their disease or to compare one's own health progress with those of others. Even more, by sharing their own health profile, patients are empowered to exchange valuable data about the real-world effects of specific medical treatments. In practice, this means anyone can explore a rich collection of crowd-sourced data about individual diseases, symptoms or treatments.

For instance, patients are able to explore the efficacy, side effects, adherence and burden of the "Carbidopa-Levodopa" treatment meant to remedy Parkinson's disease, or investigate the effects of Lithium intake on the ALS disease, solely based on the quantitative and qualitative input of thousands of individuals.

In what seems a quite revolutionary take on medical privacy, the diseases, treatments and symptoms of individual patients can be filtered, searched and compared. Alternatively, people with a specific symptom, let's say "fatigued", can investigate the effectiveness of the most popular treatments or compare their faith with the other 27,000 patients that experience this very symptom.

Aug 3

How Different People Spend Their Day

How Different Groups Spend Their Day [nytimes.com] is an interactive stacked line graph based on data from the American Time Use Survey, which asked thousands of American residents (over the age of 15) to recall every minute of a day

The accompanying NYTimes news article compares the weekday activities of the employed and unemployed: "On an average weekday, the unemployed sleep an hour more than their employed peers. They tidy the house, do laundry and yard work for more than two hours, twice as much as the employed. The unemployed also spend an extra hour in the classroom and an additional 70 minutes in front of the television." Other comparisons can be made by gender, race, age, education or the amount of children.

Reminds me of What People in Tokyo are Doing on a Tuesday, with bits of DailyRadar Trendmap and Subsidyscope.

Mar 6

Flickr Video Clock

Flickr Clock [flickr.com] created by Stamen is a visual browser for the videos that people have recently started uploading to the site. The videos are arranged chronologically, and drawn from videos that people have posted to the flickrclock group on flickr.

The bottom of the interface allows users to scroll back and forth in time, so one can get a broader sense of what the community has recently been posting.

Via Flowing Data. See also Flickr time.

Jan 22

Modista: Online Shopping by Visual Similarity

The new online shop called Modista [modista.com] collects inventories across multiple retailers, and organizes items according to their visual similarity using digital image processing and machine learning algorithms. The horizontal axis orders products by shape, while the vertical axes ranks them by color.

Currently the inventory is limited to shoes, watches, handbags and eyewear, although it seems the shopping experience is slowly but surely becoming more similar to its traditional physical counterpart.