Tag Archives | Data Visualization

Google To Sell Smart-Glasses By Year’s End

techGet ready for augmented-reality glasses that stream information to your eyeballs about the people and places surrounding you. Also, they will look like Oakleys worn by dads on motorboats. The New York Times writes:

People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.

According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600.

The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS.

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Facebook Can Predict Your Break Up

Yesterday I went to a confidential presentation of data visualization tools developed by a major media organization in New York. It’s scary just how much these organizations (among others) can learn about their “users” using these tools. This CNN story focuses on Facebook, but believe me, everyone in the tech and media space is doing the same thing:

Worried about when you might get dumped? Facebook knows.

That’s according to a graphic making the rounds online that uses Facebook status updates to chart what time of year people are splitting up.

British journalist and graphic designer David McCandless, who specializes in showcasing data in visual ways, compiled the chart. He showed off the graphic at a TED conference last July in Oxford, England.

In the talk, McCandless said he and a colleague scraped 10,000 Facebook status updates for the phrases “breakup” and “broken up.”

They found two big spikes on the calendar for breakups. The first was after Valentine’s Day…

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