Thursday, March 27, 2014

A Day Made of Glass...by Corning

A Day Made of Glass... Made possible by Corning. (2011) - YouTube:


"




"freemium" Office on iPad, before Surface

Microsoft scraps 'Windows-first' practice, puts Office on iPad before Surface - Computerworld:
Three all-touch core apps -- Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- 
have been seeded to Apple's App Store and are available now.

...The Office apps can be used by anyone free of charge to view documents and present slideshows. But to create new content or documents, or edit existing ones, customers must have an active subscription to Office 365."


Office in iTunes

Nadella unveils mobile managment suite for iPad and Android - Computerworld

Gmail e-money system

Google’s brilliant plan to get millions to adopt its e-money system: Gmail 

In May 2013, Google soft-launched a straightforward scheme for sending money to other people. It lets you connect Gmail with a Google Wallet account and send money to a friend for free (from a linked bank account) or for a small fee (from a credit card).

Google - Amazon: Cloud price war

Google's Bigger, Cheaper Cloud - NYTimes.com:

"Some of the price cuts are as much as 85 percent.
Amazon is expected to soon respond with moves of its own.
Over the long term, according to the executive in charge of Google’s public cloud, Google wants software developers, both independent and within companies, to count on prices steadily dropping at a rate that roughly tracks Moore’s Law. That means a doubling of power per dollar every 18 to 24 months. 

Google also wants its cloud business to move from a series of different services to a single, comprehensive product that handles familiar business applications, new apps, and big back-end data analysis and storage jobs."

Price war! Amazon cuts cloud costs to counter Google - Computerworld

The price of AWS' Simple Storage Service (S3) is being reduced, on average, 51 percent. The company's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) has been reduced by 30 percent to 40 percent for the latest generation of compute nodes. AWS' Relational Database Service (RDS) has been cut by 28 percent, on average. ElastiCache service has been reduced by 34 percent on average and Elastic mapReduce has been lowered by 27 percent to 61 percent.

On Tuesday, Google announced Google Compute Engine (GCE) would now cost, on average, 32 percent less. Google Storage was been cut, on average, by 68 percent. Google BigQuery on-demand analysis services were reduced, price-wise, by up to 85 percent.

D3.js: a hexagonal cartograms

Conceptualisation of a D3 linked view with a hexagonal cartogram - Spatialists:



China Still Dominates, but Some Manufacturers Look Elsewhere - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com


Advanced Visualization of Elections

way beyond blue-and-green maps

512 Paths to the White House - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com:
By MIKE BOSTOCK and SHAN CARTER , with D3.js

explained:
shancarter.com/talk/2012/visualized/


Over the Decades, How States Have Shifted - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com





IBM Node-RED for IoT

Meet Node-RED, an IBM project that fulfills the internet of things’ missing link — Tech News and Analysis:



node-red-screenshot

Vega: A Visualization Grammar

Vega: A Visualization Grammar:
"Vega is a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving and sharing visualization designs. 

With Vega you can describe data visualizations in a JSON format, and generate interactive views using either HTML5 Canvas or SVG."


As mentioned in this podcast, it is using D3, and D3 creator Mike Bostock (PhD student on Stanford, NY Times, Square) is advisor on Vega project.

podcast:
Data Stories #22: NYT Graphics and D3 with Mike Bostock and Shan Carter | Data Stories

Vega and D3 · trifacta/vega Wiki