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Windows only: Free application Tableau Public creates beautiful visualizations from your data and lets you publish them to the web, where users can interact with your charts and graphs with live updates.
The video above provides a great overview of how the tool works. Essentially, you import your data into the desktop Windows application, then play around with different charts, graphs, or other options until you find the visualization or visualizations that best fit your data. When you’re happy with what you’ve put together, you can save the outcome to the web, which uploads the charts to the Tableau Public servers. From there you can embed it on any web page YouTube-style), and users can drill down into the data to their heart’s content.
Here’s an example of Tableau Public in action from a post on the Wall Street Journal:
Dashboard at 570
Tableau Public is a free download for Windows, and looks like a great tool to try out next time you’re looking to make your otherwise boring data come to life. Update: Somehow I managed to miss the fact that Tableau Public is only free on a trial basis; its actual price tag is extremely hefty. (Though if you’re a student you can get it for as little as $69.)
Double Update: Actually, looks like Tableau Public is free after all! Straight from the horse’s mouth:
“People can download the free tool and publish their visualizations of their data for free. Tableau Public includes a free desktop product that you can download and use to publish interactive data visualizations to the web. The Tableau Public desktop saves work to the Tableau Public web servers – nothing is saved locally on your computer. All data saved to Tableau Public will be accessible by everyone on the internet, so be sure to work only with [publicly] available (and appropriate) data.
When people want to analyze their private or confidential data (particularly data in data warehouses and other large databases), then they may want to consider our commercial products.”
Apple vs Microsoft vs Sony [Graphs]
The core of any long-standing technology company is research and development. Here’s how Apple, Microsoft and Sony’s last decade of spending stack up.
Note that the first graph shows research and development as a percentage of revenue (to scale the spending by company, since revenues differ so greatly). This next graphic can help you conceptualize the revenue and R&D gap:
A Few Interesting Notes:
• Now, Microsoft spends about 17% of their revenue on R&D. Sony spends about 8%. Apple spends less than 4%.
• If you were to break down the amount of R&D that goes purely to physical (non-software) products sold by Apple and Sony, Sony would spend about $11.5 million per product while Apple would spend about $78.5 million per product. (Of course, that’s rolling the cost OS X and iPhone OS development into Macs and the iPhone, which could be seen as inflating their per product spending.)
• Microsoft just spends a lot of money in R&D, period—about $9 billion last year in generalized research (that often doesn’t lead to specific products). In terms of percentage growth over the last decade, Apple’s R&D has grown the most (nearly quadrupled) while Sony’s has grown the least (not quite doubled).
In light of these bare numbers, is it any surprise that Sony is struggling the most to capture the hearts and minds of a public hungry for gadgets?
Sources:
Apple
Apple Public Relations
Apple Investor Relations
Apple Insider 2004
Apple Insider 2005
Apple Insider 2006
Apple Insider 2008
Mac Observer
Microsoft
Microsoft Investor Relations
Sony
Sony Investor Relations
Research by David Chaid
This Is Why that Amazing NASA Earth Image Looked So Familiar
After publishing the The Most Accurate, Highest Resolution Earth View to Date, it got extremely popular: The day after, countless newspapers and blogs worldwide reposted the story. NASA wrote to us, surprised. Why? Because everyone already knew about it:
Yes, the Blue Marble is the iPhone’s default screen, which have been seen by millions of iPhone owners and by everyone who has read about the iPhone since 2007. In fact, the image has been public since 2002:
From: *************** <***********@nasa.gov>
Mr. Diaz
Hello. I am the photo editor for the Public Affairs Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
We were happy to see you featured our Blue Marble image on your website last week.
http://gizmodo.com/5478787/the-most-accurate-highest-resolution-earth-view-to-date#comments
We also featured it on our Flickr page but it has really taken off on the web. We had over 500,000 hits in the last two days alone.
Given that this is an image from 2002 I’m just curious what prompted you to post it on your site? Or did you pick it up from someplace other than our site? I see at the bottom it says “NASA via Twitter”
Really, I’m just curious because it’s gotten so much play over that few days.
Thank you for your interest in our work.
Take care,
Rebecca
The reason? Because it’s a beautiful image, that’s all. One that makes you marvel at the beauty of our planet, and how tiny and insignificant we are, but also how unique and rare. [Gizmodo—Thanks to John Hermann for telling me about the obvious]
Don’t forget to check NASA Goddard’s Flickr page. They keep posting really cool stuff.
If you’re in the military, here’s a tip: don’t put upcoming missions in your Facebook status. You wouldn’t think someone would need to tell you that, but here we are.
A raid on suspected militants in the West Bank was cancelled yesterday after an Israeli soldier updated his Facebook status to read “On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, god willing, we come home.” The solider has since, unsurprisingly, been relieved of combat duty for being a moron. He’ll also spend 10 days in prison for his update.
Trying to educate soldiers on the importance of not leaking classified info to Facebook, the Israel Defense Forces have started putting up new posters in bases:
In posters placed on military bases, a mock Facebook page shows the images of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. Below their pictures – and Facebook “friend requests” – reads the slogan: “You think that everyone is your friend?”
I really want to see one of those posters. Anyone in the IDF want to send us a picture? My email address is below. I won’t post it on Facebook, promise. [NY Times]
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/EPIG2PU6xqU/what-do-you-buy-online-vs-in-stores
Online advertising company Permuto pulled data from the U.S. Census Bureau into a nice infographic comparing people’s purchasing habits in-store vs. online, and it got us wondering: What do you buy online vs. in stores?
(Click the image above for a closer look.)
According to the Census Bureau’s data, the old brick and mortar stores are still responsible for the majority of sales in most of the categories, save for a few notable categories, including books, clothing, and electronics. Since Lifehacker readers are a more tech-savvy crowd than most of the public, we’d guess you tend more toward the buy online crowd. Are you more of a virtual shopper, or do you still prefer to touch and feel before you buy? It certainly varies depending on what you’re buying, so tell us about it in the comments.
The iPod Touch Is This Generation’s Tamagotchi
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/SM6HjEBs9Ok/the-ipod-touch-is-this-generations-tamagotchi
All these wonderful things we’re learning today, from data! First, we find out that Android is a guy thing. Now, we discover that the iPod Touch shares more demographics with glittering vampires than smartphones. iPod Touch: Kid stuff.
The age distribution makes a lot of sense, especially with the direct available comparison of the iPhone: the iPod Touch is a good gift, a plausible purchase, and a good investment for a young person right now. An iPhone with a $70-a-month minimum contract is a tougher sell, either to parents, or to kids mostly supported by their parents.
And these kids don’t just buy different gadgets than adults—they use them differently, too. For example, they looooove apps:
But they’re stingy little bastards, these kids: 
Buying an app can be tough without a credit card, so again, this isn’t shocking. But it does poke a little hole in the idea of the iPod Touch as a massive moneymaker for Apple. Hardware sales are tremendous and highly profitable, sure, but once the devices are in users’ soft little baby hands, they don’t keep raking it in like the iPhone does. [AdMob]
Inside Google’s Secret Search Algorithm
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/zzkIcilnJp4/inside-googles-secret-search-algorithm
Wired’s Steven Levy takes us inside the “algorithm that rules the web“—Google’s search algorithm, of course—and if you use Google, it’s kind of a must-read. PageRank? That’s so 1997.
It’s known that Google constantly updates the algorithm, with 550 improvements this year—to deliver smarter results and weed out the crap—but there are a few major updates in its history that have significantly altered Google’s search, distilled in a helpful chart in the Wired piece. For instance, in 2001, they completely rewrote the algorithm; in 2003, they added local connectivity analysis; in 2005, results got personal; and most recently, they’ve added in real-time search for Twitter and blog posts.
The sum of everything Google’s worked on—the quest to understand what you mean, not what you say—can be boiled down to this:
This is the hard-won realization from inside the Google search engine, culled from the data generated by billions of searches: a rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around. “The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”
Oh, and by the way, you’re a guinea pig every time you search for something, if you hadn’t guessed as much already. Google engineer Patrick Riley tells Levy, “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously.” It lets them constantly experiment on a smaller scale—even if they’re only conducting a particular experiment on .001 percent of queries, that’s a lot of data.
Be sure to check out the whole piece, it’s ridiculously fascinating, and borders on self-knowledge, given how much we all use Google (sorry, Bing). [Wired, Sweet graphic by Wired's Mauricio Alejo]
WTF Is Google Doing? [Google]
I don’t understand Google Shopper. Not because the function—searching for books, CDs, DVDs and more by using the cover art or barcode—is confusing. But because they already have a visual search app built into new Android phones, Goggles.
Goggles does the same thing: You take a picture of something, like a book cover, and it searches for it. I get that Shopper is slightly different, with more of a direct Amazon-competitive slant, since you can bookmark products to buy them later (presumably through Google Checkout).
But why not just integrate that into Goggles? Why the hell does this separate other product exist? Like Fake Steve says, WTF is going on over there? Android and Chrome OS? Wave and Buzz? (Okay, Buzz and Wave aren’t an entirely fair comparison, though try explaining them to a normal person.) Now Goggles and Shopper? Am I just missing something? [Google]
Windows Mobile’s Incredible Death Spiral
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/YplxNHBy8r0/windows-mobiles-incredible-death-spiral
Before Windows Phone 7 was even an embryo of a concept, Windows Mobile was king: It powered nearly half of smartphones in use, a led the industry in features. Then, in 2007, things started to go wrong. Very, very wrong.
Silicon Alley Insider has charted Windows Mobile’s platform share, which is to say the proportion of users who were using it at a given time, over the last four years. For showing decline, figures like these are more telling than sales—they mean that, for years now, people haven’t been buying Windows Mobile phones nearly as fast as they’ve been ditching them.
More interesting than what it shows is what it projects: Windows Mobile 6.x phones have been collectively kneecapped by Microsoft’s announcement yesterday, and rendered spectacularly unbuyable outside of enterprise circles. In other words, that line—the one that dragged down past RIM in 2008, and that dropped past Apple last year—is going to keep plunging for the rest of this year, until Windows Phone 7 tries to haul it back up. And until then, it’s only going to get steeper. [Silicon Alley Insider]
The iPad Costs Apple As Little As $229.35 to Build
The $500 16GB, Wi-Fi only iPad costs Apple less than half that to build, according to a recent component breakdown from iSuppli. And for the 64GB 3G iPad, Apple clears nearly $500 in profit. Here’s how it breaks down:
Apple iPad Estimated Bill-of-Materials and Manufacturing Cost Analysis:
This will no doubt be updated once iSuppli and others are able to do a teardown of an actual device, but those estimated profit margins are pretty stunning, particularly on the higher-end models. iSuppli also points out that the 32GB versions of the iPad only cost $30 more to make than their 16GB counterparts, yet retail for $100 more—a good indication that that’s where they expect the sweet spot to be in the market.
Goes a long way to explaining why Apple’s so willing to be flexible on the price, no?[iSuppli]
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