Juice Analytics

We’re teaming up with O’Reilly Media to challenge you to participate in a data visualization contest leading up to O’Reilly’s Strata New York Summit September 19 – 23.

Data has become nearly as essential as food in both our personal and professional lives. So, why not use food as the basis for a data visualization contest?

Play With Your Food.

Join in the competition and visualize information about all the delicious fare our society enjoys. (First, you’ll want to put down that chicken wing, lest you get sauce on your keypad.) Being the foodie you are, you’ll appreciate that we’ve found some pretty cool data sets from FoodFacts.com for you to play with, making this subject matter you can really, uh, sink your teeth into.

A Trip to NYC, Strata Conference Passes and More.

The grand prize winner will win a trip to the Big Apple to present their winning visualization at the O’Reilly Strata NY Summit in New York, NY September 20 – 21, 2011.  Other prizes include Strata NY Conference passes, ebooks from oreilly.com and more. Sweet.

On-the-Map Judges.

Who would pass up an opportunity to get the attention of these judges, let alone have their work reviewed by Flowing Data’s Nathan Yau, The New York Time’s Amanda Cox and Juice’s own Chris Gemignani?  Serious bragging rights.

All That.

More information about the challenge categories, the rules, the prizes, the judges, judging criteria and all you could possibly want or need know about the contest is here.

So, get started on your data visualization now, while your appetite is whet for competition. Entries are due by August 28, 2011.

Juice Fans Get 30% Off Strata NY.

Register now to attend the O’Reilly Strata NY Conference, and get 30% off your registration fee with the special Juice fan discount.  Just enter “JUICE” on the conference registration page.  Learn more.

Juice Friends and Fans receive a 20% discount to O’Reilly’s Strata NY Conference in NYC September 19 – 23, 2011.

Just plug in the code JUICE, and you’ll receive our special 20% discount reserved just for you.

Register for one, two or all three of the conference segments here.

• Strata Jumpstart
• Strata Summit
• Strata Conference

The Strata Conference covers the latest and best tools and technologies for the data discipline along the entire data supply chain—from gathering, cleaning, analyzing and storing data to communicating data intelligence effectively.

You’ll find hardcore technical sessions on parallel computing, machine learning and interactive visualizations, as well as case studies from finance, media, healthcare and technology.  The Strata Conference also brings in provocative reports from the leading edge, and showcases the people, tools, and technologies that make data work.  It’s simply the conference where you want to be this September.

Confirmed speakers include The New York Times‘ Jer Thorpe, Hilary Mason of bit.ly, Pete Warden with OpenHeatMap and Chief Digital Officer of the City of New York, Rachel Sterne. You can bet more names you’ll recognize are yet to be announced.

Register now and take advantage of the Juice Friends and Fans discount.  We’ll see you there.

Summer means busy at Juice, and since we’re headed to NYC this week (July 14 – 15), we thought we’d throw that out there in case you might like to meet up while we’re in town. There’s lots going in the industry, we can chat about the latest and greatest at Juice and you can share what’s going on in your corner of the data viz world.

If you’ll be in the City, and would like to catch up with us, comment here — or better yet, send us an email at info@juiceanalytics.com.

Cheers!

Our founder and CEO, Zach Gemignani, went on the road recently to speak to a group of Voice of the Customer (VOC) professionals and customer intelligence experts at the Allegiance Engage Summit in Park City, Utah.  (Thanks for taking one for the team, Zach.)

Zach’s overall objective was to demonstrate how attendees could gain clear, actionable insights from consumer data.  I’m told that Zach delivered his message about as well as he crafted the data visualizations he used to build it.  In fact, it is rumored that Zach was so engaging that he was compared to none other than Guy Kawasaki, who was also speaking at the Summit.  (Fellow Juicers made mention of head room issues following that comment.)

Allegiance Radio will be airing a podcast of an interview with Zach from the Engage Summit on June 7 at 3:30 p.m. EDT on www.blogtalkradio.com,  Join via VoIP, chat or via phone at (619) 996-1642.  www.blogtalkradio/allegiance/2011/06/07/allegiance-summit-an-interview-with-juice-analytics

You can go to their website anytime after that to review the interview in its entirety.  Following the podcast, we will post a copy of the interview here on our website, as well.

Following is a summary of key content from Zach’s presentation along with resources that may inspire you to get to know your consumer data better to gain insights to move your business forward.  If you have questions or comments, feel free to send them our way.

Know Your Audience

Consider and understand the context of your audience.  ”Actionable” has as much to do with the recipient as the information.  Is it something they have the power or the influence on which to act?

Know Your Tools

Whatever your tool is, it’s worth your while to get good at it.  This saves you time and frustration.

Choose the Right Data

The gourmet values data quality – the right metrics, the right context, presented effectively.  The gourmand, on the other hand, is more interested in quantity. A gourmand believes that more is better, in part because they aren’t sure what they’ll do with the data in the first place.  (See the entire “Data Gourmet” blog at www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/being-a-data-gourmet/

Focusing on just the right data is a concept perhaps best summarized by Amanda Cox. “Data isn’t like your kids.  You don’t have to pretend to love them equally.” – Amanda Cox, New York Times

Choosing the Right Chart

So, how do you choose the right chart?  This is the challenge. Work by taking the most important attributes of your data (based on the question you want to answer) — mapping to the visual elements that most effectively convey that information.

Resources include www.chartchooser.com, www.extremepresentation.com/design/charts and www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/chart-selection-art-and-science/

Tell a Story

You have choices about how data is presented.  Make your choices deliberately.  Consider your audience, their needs and the information.   Then tell a story that clearly resonates with them and compels them — inspires them —  into action.

Juice’s Jon Buffington took center stage at the National Capital Area Google Technology user’s group in the D.C. area recently and busted some fancy moves.  And, you should have seen him once his presentation started.

Taking the group through the process of designing and implementing an interactive data visualization using Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Jon also incorporated DOM, Canvas, SVG, ReST and Scala browser and server technologies to complete the information experience.

GWT is an open source development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications, and is used by many products at Google, including Google Adwords and Orkut.

Armed with a tutorial, Jon compared browser graphical techniques and their respective technologies compatible with GWT. As exhibited in this little gem, Jon simplified the visualization down to a basic bar chart, making the similarities and differences between the technologies amazingly clear. (Yo, Jon.)

Download the presentation, and adopt some formidable moves of your own.

Jon Buffington Shares Insight on Building High Performance Data Visualizations

Jon leads our product development team here at Juice, and crafts ingenious software technology that transforms data into information experiences. You can check out more of his work, specifically, here.

We’ll let you guys know where we’ll be next. Or, if you really want to keep up, sign up for our RSS feed and/or follow us on Twitter. (Hint: We share lots of little tidbits on Twitter that we don’t share a-n-y-w-h-e-r-e else.)

Can luck be an acquired skill?  Can you create your own luck?  Is it possible to put yourself or your company in circumstances so that you’re more likely to experience good luck or even great fortune?

Have you ever known someone who seemed to win at everything?  My sister is like that.  If there’s a contest on the radio or a drawing for something, she’ll win if she enters.  She has won tickets to countless concerts and events, and even several all expenses paid trips.  If you ask her, my sister will tell you that she simply expects to win.  And win she does.

It’s my observation that there are some things you can actually do that set you up for more positive experiences than the average Joe.

Attitude
As we’ve established, your attitude can invite luck.  People who are open to opportunities, expect positive experiences, and are actually looking for them are more likely to experience/notice them.

Combine that with a personality that is inviting and communicative, and these happy-go-lucky types have a greater propensity to make contacts which seem to the rest of us to spontaneously erupt into fortunate situations and opportunities.

Timing
We’ve all noticed that being at the right place at the right time is an advantage when it comes to being lucky in business and life, in general.  Wouldn’t you like to claim credit for inventing the Internet?  Alas, this one’s already taken by a certain prominent Democrat.

Curiosity
A healthy dose of curiosity can lead you to stumble across a great idea — a happening also referred to as “dumb luck”.  Sometimes, just asking more and different questions can lead you down paths not previously taken.

Reportedly, Percy Spencer, the inventor of the microwave oven, of course, stumbled upon the technology while working for Raytheon in 1945.  A candy bar in his pocket melted (where else would you keep one?), and his sense of curiosity led him to further test and confirm his accidental discovery — ultimately leading to the microwave oven that Raytheon launched in 1947 — at $5,000 a pop. (Spencer went on to win all kinds of awards and accolades, and even to have a building named after him.)

Tools
When running a business, you need to have reliable tools that you trust to augment your experience, data and gut instincts.  That’s why we’re big fans of resources that keep us sharp like Nathan Yau’s FlowingData blog, The New York Times Visualization Lab and David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful.  Find the tools that work for you, refresh them as necessary and use them consistently to keep you sharp, in tune and constantly on the look out for opportunities and good fortune.

So, is luck an acquired skill?

I’d say if you work hard at it — and you’re lucky, it can be. (Throw in an extra measure of curiosity and maybe they’ll name a building after you.)

If you’ll be in Atlanta on Tuesday, January 25, we’ve got a special treat for you. Our own Jon Buffington, CTO of Juice, will be at the Atlanta Spring Users Group discussing how we use Spring Framework 3 and Adobe Flex 4 to build web-based data visualization applications. The meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. at One Alliance Center, Suite 630, 6th Floor Conference Room, and Jon’s presentation begins at 7:00 p.m.

The application features components from Juice Analytics JuiceKit™ visualization library http://www.juicekit.org, and Jon’s presentation will demonstrate the following.

• Integrating Adobe Flex and Spring Framework using both Spring BlazeDS Integration and Spring Actionscript .
• Accelerated data warehouse querying using Spring Framework’s JDBC support and Spring Contexts.
• Multiple application modes using Spring Contexts (prior to more elegant support coming in Spring Framework 3.1).

You can find more details about the Atlanta Spring Users Group and Tuesday night’s event at http://www.meetup.com/AtlantaSpring/calendar/15896725/.

We hope to see you there.

We’ve had enough of the snow in Atlanta and D.C., so we’re off to warmer weather (for a few days, anyway)!

Please join us for the O’Reilly Strata “Making Data Work” Conference, February 1-3, 2011, taking place in beautiful Santa Clara, CA. (Can you say boondoggle?! Seriously — there’s a whole lot to gain from the entire conference which is why you’ll want to make as many of the sessions as you can, no matter how beautiful this place is!)

As a Juice fan, you qualify for a 25% discount on the registration fee for this event which will draw everyone from startups to Fortune 500 companies looking to learn more about “Turning Data into Decisions” — one of our favorite topics.

Zach Gemignani, founder of Juice Analytics, and Ken Hilburn, VP, Community Enablement, Juice Analytics, will be hosting the Tutorial, “Make People Fall in Love with Your Data: A Practical Tutorial for Data Visualization and UI Design” at 9:00 a.m. PST, Tuesday, February 2, 2011 in Mission City B1.

To register and receive the 25% Juice Fan discount, enter the code str11fsd. More information on the conference including other speakers, conference schedule and highlights is available at http://strataconf.com/strata2011. The Conference location, The Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, is booked for the event. However, accommodation information is available at the
Santa Clara Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. Feel free to reach out if you have questions, and we’ll steer you in the right direction.

We hope to see you in Santa Clara!

Visually,

Lisa

The 12 Days of Christmas, as referenced in the song, starts in most traditions on Christmas Day and ends on January 6. Our version, the “12 Days of Data Visualization”, allows you to have all of your gifts in one day — bonus. Each “day” links to data visualization resources that we’ve shared with you over the years or find particularly enlightening, and are well worth repeating — the proverbial “gifts that keep on giving”.

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a white paper to set my data free.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Two Hans
Rosling presentations.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Three tree-maps.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Four font rules.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Five filter features.

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Six principles of context.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Seven data viz galleries for inspiration.

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Eight better dashboards.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Nine online resources (and a great Stanford data viz video).

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Ten metrics no-no’s.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, Eleven lines of code.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, “12-step” pie chart treatment.

From all of us to you and yours, have a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year! Wishing you many successful visualizations in 2011!

The Juice Analytics Team