Alex Reid

Pitch Interactive, a data visualization company from California has released an interactive visualization of the number of drone attacks by the US military in Pakistan.

It’s not without critics of course.

Say good bye to phones and computers.

Google has embarked on a new revolutionary front first envisioned by Steve Mann, the father of wearable computing. Google’s new physical product is called Google Glass, an augmented reality head-mounted display with the additional capability to capture video and take photos. This is the actual product version of the visual search application Google Goggles.

Google has announced that they will be selling the Google Glasses to US developers for $1,500 (USD) and may be consumer-ready by next year.

Here is what your day could look like next year:

Artist Gary Simpson created a series of frescos in 2006 based on global indicators from the CIA’s factbook.

See the images here.

“The series embraces the dichotomy of static numbers versus the randomness of the artist’s technique. A collage of numbers and names of countries printed on strips of paper, brass bars, slats of wood in varying lengths and shredded dollar bills, tell the story in a 3- dimensional way.”

I recommend you check out this wonderful personal art project produced by hint.fm (Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg) because it displays surface wind of the United States in real-time.

The data comes from the open weather data collected all over the United States by the National Digital Forecast Database, but what we see is art.

Last week, Jesper Andersen was talking at the Strata Data Conference about how to build a “data narrative” using social media and online information to tell a story about a neighbourhood.

He focused on San Francisco’s Haight Street and with the public information from government open data, mapping data, real estate, rental listings data with data from social services like Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram.

He looked at the safety element by finding the crime statistics from DataSF.org, and looked at an analysis of Tweets and found that, by distribution, people were more negative on the lower half of Haight. He was also able to see what people found interesting on Haight by mapping pictures from Instagram to the street as well to offer a creative Google Street View.

Story of Haight

It’s not the next Google Street View but it does offer hope inspiration to mobile application developers to use open data and social media data to tell a story.