Aug 25

Icons of the Web

By admin cloud computing, communication-standards, design concepts, information aesthetics, infosthetics, insights No Comments »

A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.

We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440. Since your web browser would choke on that, we have created the interactive viewer below (click and drag to pan, double-click to zoom, or type in a site name to go right to it).

via Icons of the Web.

Jul 02

Infographics on the iPad: The Times Summarizing the Health of England – information aesthetics

By admin UI, information aesthetics, infosthetics, insights No Comments »

Designed by Applied Works, this interactive infographic for the iPad platform was commissioned to accompany a news story on the North/South health divide in England. The different Health Wheels distil 32 different health indicators across 9 geographical regions. The wheels act as visual barometers for the health of each region, in order to provide users with an intuitive way of scanning through all the indicators.

A map of England communicates the national perspective in response to the wheel, with a traffic light colour code identifying which regions score better than, worse than or average compared to the national mean. For the regional view, segments on the wheel are color-coded according to the performance of each indicator.For those infosthetics.com readers lucky enough to have access to both an iPad and The Times app, this infographic lives along a story titled “Major Shift Planned for NHS Treatment”, which is currently featured in the News section. Those readers are also kindly invited to leave a short personal review in the comments section below.

Does this new form of infographics truly exploit iPads unique capabilities?

For all other mortals, including myself, the Times kindly provided a short video demonstration and a Flickr set to demonstrate this fresh incarnation of information graphics on an alternative display medium.

via Infographics on the iPad: The Times Summarizing the Health of England – information aesthetics.

Jun 03

John Underkoffler points to the future of UI

By admin UI, communication-standards, design concepts, insights, uncategorized No Comments »

In February 2010, the man who built the technology of Minority Report twice — once for the movie, and once in real life — spoke at TED about the future of user interface design.

Yesterday, TED posted John Underkoffler’s entire fifteen-minute video presentation — a copy of which you’ll find right after the break.

Get a curated glimpse into his company’s tech in the following demo, and hear from the man himself when the gloves might come off. And if that doesn’t satisfy your appetite, read an in-depth interview with Underkoffler at our more coverage link.

May 20

Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O

By jeromewagner SOA, cloud computing, disaster-recovery, document-management, green-it, insights, network-security, offsite-backup, operating systems & collaborative tools No Comments »

Amazon’s cloud storage services are going to be getting another major competitor this week: Google.

We hear that this week during its I/O conference, Google will be announcing a new service that is a direct competitor with Amazon’s S3 cloud storage. Google’s service will be called Google Storage for Developers, or ‘GS’. We believe it will be available in a private beta initially.

We also hear that the service will be positioned to make it very easy for existing S3 customers to make the switch to Google Storage.Features will include a REST API, the ability to use Google accounts to offer authenticated downloads, and data redundancy. Developers will be able to use a command line tool to manage their data, and there will be a web interface as well.We’d previously reported that Google was looking to expand its cloud service offerings, but that it would primarily be focused on ‘value-added’ services that took advantage of technology Google has been using internally, like its translation tools and video processing.

We’re hearing that such value-added services will not be part of this launch, but it is highly likely that they will be coming in the future. And that’s the key here — competitors will have a hard time matching the array of technologies and infrastructure Google has spent years developing.

via Google To Launch Amazon S3 Competitor ‘Google Storage’ At I/O.

May 18

The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday

By admin insights, it-projects, uncategorized No Comments »

The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday

BY WARREN RIDDLE — MAY 14TH 2010 AT 5:40PM

Albert Einstein first postulated the possibility of amplifying protons to create “masers” in 1917, but the theory wouldnt produce effective technology until the post-World War II period. The science of masers continued to evolve over the following decade, and, in 1958, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow of Bell Labs published a seminal report that would spark a scientific revolution. The paper proposed that, by incorporating maser properties with the light spectrum, researchers could emit an intense optical beam.

Theodore Maiman of Hughes Labs would finally bring that research to fruition when he constructed the first functional laser and fired the first blast on May 16th of 1960. For those keeping score, that means the laser is officially turning 50 this very day. According to CNETs Daniel Terdiman, Hughes Labs which would later become Raytheon initially developed lasers that were primarily used by the military for guidance and targeting operations, a system which would prove significant and highly effective during the Vietnam War. The beams have since diverged into a multitude of directions, as the technology has been applied to a seemingly infinite array of endeavors — even if its just a cheap method for kids to annoy their pets, teachers and classmates.

While 50 is still relatively young, this year is currently hosting an incredible laser renaissance as scientists seem to be realizing the full potential of the technology. What better way to celebrate a monumental milestone than with the completion of the worlds largest laser, spaceships engaging in distant orbital exchanges, and — finally — a mosquito-zapping Photon Fence? Huzzah! [From: CNET]

via The Laser Celebrates Its 50th Frickin Birthday.

May 06

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes!!

By jeromewagner cloud computing, hardware, insights, storage No Comments »

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes

• Massive figure equal to a million million gigabytes

The growth in digital content last year alone was enough to fill 75bn Apple iPads. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Every man, woman and child on the planet using micro-blogging site Twitter for a century. For many people that may sound like a vision of hell, but for watchers of the tremendous growth of digital communications it is a neat way of presenting the sheer scale of the so-called digital universe. The explosion of social networking, online video services and digital photography, plus the continued popularity of mobile phones, email and web browsing, coupled with the growing desire of corporations and governments to know and store ever more data about everyone has created an unprecedented amount of digital information and introduced a new word to the nerd lexicon: a zettabyte.

Research published today estimates that the so-called digital universe grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes – a petabyte is a million gigabytes – or 0.8 zettabytes. That is the equivalent of all the information that could be stored on 75bn Apple iPads, which would equal the digital output from a century's worth of constant tweeting by all of Earth's inhabitants.

By way of stark contrast between the output of present day humanity and its pre-digital predecessor, experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.This year, the planet's digital content will blast through the zettabyte barrier to reach 1.2 ZB, according to the fourth annual survey of the world's bits and bytes conducted by technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by IT firm EMC. A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.

via Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes | Technology | The Guardian.

Apr 23

BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartography

By admin infosthetics, insights, other, uncategorized No Comments »

BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartograpy [bbc.co.uk] is yet another example of a BBC television series which focuses on matters concerning data visualization. It is another proof how visualization is becoming an interesting feature in popular press.

While the online video clips are restricted to people living in the UK (snif), foreigners are still able to explore a couple of compelling example projects, such as a NASA Map of the dark side of the Moon, Phillippe Bourcier's map of the movement of data on the Internet, the most complete map of the universe, a map of social conversations on blogs, next to a whole section dedicated to historical maps. The last episode even delves inside the world of political and satirical maps.

People living in the UK are welcome to make the rest of us jealous, and describe the quality of the series in the comments section below.

In the meantime, others have the chance to marvel at YouTube's surprising top search results of the query “beauty of maps”.

via BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartography – information aesthetics.

Apr 15

Psion’s new take on internet business | Business | The Guardian

By admin MobileOS, cloud computing, design concepts, hardware, insights No Comments »

Psion is encouraging its customers to adapt its products and then share that knowledge with everyone online

Richard Wray

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 April 2010 19.34 BST

A Psion Series 5 electronic personal organiser, 1999 vintage. The Organisers were a big hit with gadget fans in the 1980s and 1990s. Photograph: David Sillitoe

Next month one of the more venerable names in British technology will start field tests of its latest device: the product of a complete overhaul of the company and another test case for a new way of doing business spawned by the internet.

The newest handheld computer from Psion is based on individual modules which resellers and buyers can configure and even add to, to meet their specific needs. Rather than relying on the traditional one-size-fits-all model – or its expensive alternative, making bespoke products for each customer – Psion is actively encouraging its customers to adapt its products. It is also encouraging its customers to then share their experiences and get involved in research, development and after-sales care, by using the internet.

“We opened up an online community and customers and partners [resellers] are starting to talk to each other,” according to John Conoley, Psion’s chief executive. “At first, frankly, it was frightening. We are in there too and we are learning, we make mistakes and get flamed occasionally … but at other times you see a customer with a problem and one of our resellers – often from a completely different market – will chip in and deal with their issue.”

The idea of using the internet to interact with all users of a particular product or service is becoming increasingly popular in business, with executives talking about “mutualising” their operations. For many companies it makes financial, rather than purely philosophical, sense.

Mobile phone company GiffGaff – funded by O2 – gives money to users who help others with their technical problems, saving on customer support costs.

via Psion’s new take on internet business | Business | The Guardian.

Mar 30

Data Centre Specialist Group – Measuring Up? Metrics and your data centre

By admin green-it, industry best practise, insights, ngo, proffesional bodies No Comments »

In the quest for metrics that describe what we do in the data centre and how efficiently we do it, we’ve nailed PUE which despite it’s shortcomings has been adopted as the first simple metric to describe the inefficiency in getting power from the utility feed to the IT equipment.

So what’s next? PUE is not and cannot be the end of the story. What do we need to define and describe next as PUE only gets us so far? Is it data centre or IT productivity? There have been many attempts to describe the “useful work” done by a data centre, but those that have tried know it is far from a simple problem. We’ve seen DCeP, CUPS, CADE, DPPE and others trying to do so but none have quite hit the mark.

We are right now at a turning point in our industry, following our last event we (Intellect and DCSG) have begun discussions with DECC (Department for Energy & Climate Change) on data centres as an industry establishing an industry wide Climate Change Agreement (CCA) as an alternative to being penalised within the Carbon Reduction Committment (CRC).

Establishing a CCA requires the industry to define and measure its productivity in some way so the metrics we agree and define to measure ourselves will make a significant difference to our future as a sector, certainly from a regulatory perspective within the UK initially and then further afield.

But what metric will be most useful for measuring the productivity your data centre? Or are we all on the wrong path? What’s the best way of demonstrating to your manager\CIO\board that your data centres are as efficient as they can be and delivering value for your business?

Come along to the latest DCSG Event to listen to the options from the industry’s leading figures on what they this is the best way to proceed. The evening will be split into two parts with the second half of the evening giving way to a panel discussion and debate. As is the norm with DCSG events, the audience normally have just as much (if not more!) to say than the panelists!

Always interesting, insightful and surprisingly entertaining this is a DCSG Event you shouldn’t miss!

This Event will be run in association with the Green Grid EMEA.

via Data Centre Specialist Group – Measuring Up? Metrics and your data centre.

Mar 24

Navigating 13.3 gigapixels on a 22 megapixel display wall

By admin cloud computing, design concepts, insights, it-projects, operating systems & collaborative tools No Comments »

Navigating 13.3 gigapixels on a 22 megapixel display wall.

Tor-Magne Stien Hagen, Daniel Stødle and Otto J. Anshus, University of Tromsø, Norway In collaboration with Eirik Helland Urke, gigapix.no

Gigapixel images are great. The level of detail, the scope of the images and the sheer amount of data they represent are all fascinating. Viewing them in an enjoyable and efficient manner is another issue entirely. As digital cameras get better and computers become faster, stitching ever larger images becomes possible. In late 2009, a 26 gigapixel image of Dresden in Germany was published online, and currently a gigapixel-image of Paris is the worlds largest gigapixel image.

However, looking at these or pretty much any other gigapixel image online, you are faced with a small viewer confined to your browser window. Can we do better?I work at the Display Wall laboratory at the Department of Computer Science, University of Tromsø located in Northern Norway. The Display Wall lab is home to a 22 megapixel display wall, constructed from 28 projectors and driven by a display cluster of about 30 nodes 28 to do the actual graphics, and another few to do other tasks. Each projector creates a 1024x768 resolution image, which when tiled together with the others form a 7168x3072 resolution display.

During the Fall and Winter of 2009, we contacted Eirik Helland Urke, who had recently published a gigapixel image of Tromsø on his website, www.gigapix.no. You can navigate that image for yourself here albeit with the previously stated “in a tiny browser window” caveat. A fellow graduate student of mine, Tor-Magne Stien Hagen, went to work on building a viewer for gigapixel-scale images on the display wall. We combined his WallScope system with my Interaction Spaces system for device- and touch-free interaction with the display wall, and the result was a very smooth and enjoyable experience for navigating very, very high-resolution images.

More technical details will follow as we have time to write them down. We also have a paper coming up -- stay tuned.

via Navigating 13.3 gigapixels on a 22 megapixel display wall.

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