Tech Sharecase, 4 June 2010

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Ellen Kaufman, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur,  Ryan Phillips

Kobo
We briefly discussed Kobo, a competitor to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. A comparison chart provided at the Kobo web site charts Kobo’s features amongst its competitors.

Information Aesthetics
We then discussed the blog Information Aesthetics. This blog seeks out and presents projects that display information and data in creative ways. Some examples discussed were information arcs, the bible cross reference visualization project and a wheel of nutrition that displays portion sizes on dinner plates.

The conversation moved towards other ways of displaying information and the tools used to do so. Microsoft was mentioned given the fact that Excel 2010 is going to incorporate Spark Lines. We then took at look at Google Motion Charts that can be used in iGoogle and Google Docs. A few of us were introduced to motion charts through Hans Rosling’s Wealth & Health of Nations Motion Chart and his TED Talk . Also shown was the Wall Street Journal’s market sector maps for stock performance.

A couple of other web sites were mentioned: 1) Many Eyes a site for sharing data visualization and 2) InfoChimps for downloading all sorts of data sets.

Also touched upon was the Netflix prize. This was a $1 million contest for accurate predictions of movie ratings based on Netflix user movie preferences. The prize was awarded last September and a new contest was announced.

Miscellaneous
The conversation then moved to the current and future state of student printing, some of the issues and possible solutions. We also discussed the use of GoogleDocs on campus.

Lastly, we talked about the Boston, MA, public media outlet WGBH’s Open Vault–their online media archive and library.  Roy Tennant’s covered Open Vault in a recent Library Journal blog entry.

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One Response to Tech Sharecase, 4 June 2010

  1. It’s interesting to compare the software used for the WGBH Open Vault with the software used by NJVid.

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