MLB.com is taking the rich data they have from major league baseball games and presenting them within the context of the social activity that’s happening during a game. They do so by laying each bit of data on a timeline – tracking tweet activity throughout the game and even letting you slice it by team – and letting you interact with that data.
MLB.com has always been at the front of the pack in handling complex real-time data (with Gameday as the flagship product) so it’s nice to see them extend that to include social data as well. While I was only able to find these visualizations for games that were over, I expect (hope) that they’re going to give this a go in real-time as the games are happening.
Update: You can grab the deep link to this feature from the game wrap screen by clicking on the Twitter icon in the top right. Thanks to Jason from the MLB.com team for pointing that out in the comments.
The moment I saw screenshots of Roundarch’s work on the real-time stats dashboard for the New York Jets’ new stadium I was smitten and not just because I’m a huge fan of the Jets (as well as Rex Ryan’s leadership model). I love how they’ve taken really complex information that spans different categories (food, parking, merchandise) and made it clear, accessible and actionable (and very much on brand, btw).
The Jets’ executive team gets:
What exactly is the system capable of? Let’s start with concessions and merchandise. While a game is underway, NY Jets’ owner Woody Johnson will see a four-panel layout that shows a variety of metrics, from gross spending to total transactions to average amount spent per transaction. The stadium is virtually divided up by each level, and Johnson can zoom in on individual stores and concession stands to see which jerseys are selling, or which beer isn’t. The stadium is heat-mapped too, so if lines are getting to long, mobile vendors can be directed to help ease the burden.
While the fans benefit as well:
The Command Center won’t just help managers and executives, but will soon aim to improve the fan experience as well. Cisco has invested $100 million into the stadium, and one rep estimates the company’s technology could provide fans with estimated wait times in the near future. The dashboard will also warn of choke points at stadium gates and concession stands, so fans can be informed of how to avoid the longest line for a burger, or the best way to exit after the game.
Companies have always had data at their disposal to use to help them make decisions but I think we’re going to start seeing companies seeing the value in thoughtful interface design as a window to that data and that makes me really excited.
Read more about it over at Fast Company
Awesome awesome visualization of Inception. The more I think about and talk about the movie with others, the more I need to see it again.
(via Inception Infographic by ~dehahs)
I recently came across Tonight.im, a clever little mashup that takes my data from my Withings Scale (highly recommended internet-connected scale) and maps it to my foursquare (highly recommended location-based service 
) checkins so I can visualize how some of the decisions I’ve made about the places I go – food, bars, cafes – may be impacting my weight gain/loss over time.
The interface is still quite spartan but the data seeds are there for some really interesting behavior analysis. I can’t wait to see where they take this service (they’re already teasing a Top Healthy & Unhealthy Places feature)
Sign up and keep an eye on Tonight.im.
The team at Panic have rigged up this amazing (and beautiful) real-time display of the data immediately relevant to their team. Projects that fall in the cross section of dataviz and productivity really interest me. It reminds me a bit of the dashboard that Crispin Porter + Bogusky set up to visualize the health and status of their ongoing projects.
Here’s some info from the team at Panic:
What’s on the board?
The idea quickly grew beyond “Project Status”, and has become a hub of all sorts of internal Panic information. What you’re actually looking at is an internal-only webpage that updates frequently using AJAX which shows:
- E-Mail Queue — number of messages / number of days.
- Project Status — sorry for the heavy censorship — you know how it is!
- Important Countdowns
- Revenue — comparing yesterday to the day before, not so insightful (yet).
- Live Tri-Met Bus Arrivals — when it’s time to go home!
The Panic Calendar
- Employee Twitter Messages
- Any @Panic Twitter Messages — i.e., be nice! They go on our screen!
I highly recommend you head on over to their blog and read all about it.
I love the idea of a map customized for what’s important to *only* you. The illustration style is perfect. I’m also a huge sucker for the giant blue whale which was my favorite place to hang out as a child. That and the dinosaur room. Check out the large version here.
(via kottke)
Personas is an interesting installation from some folks at MIT that takes your first and last name and then uses your online presence to develop a high level persona for you. You can see mine above.
Here’s their description of how it works:
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.
I need to play around with this more but on the surface, it seems pretty neat. It practically loses all value if you don’t have a unique name (by Google’s standards).
Try it out and see what you think.
Just the right amount of Stella Artois can make you feel like a star on the pool table but this is a whole new level of being in the zone. (ffd to 2 mins in to see what I mean)
(via Augmented Reality Pool – Henry’s posterous)
Toscaninis (an ice cream shop in Boston) has a nice real-time visualization of what people are saying about their place on Twitter.
(via @dens on Flickr)
