ReadWriteWeb

In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we're dealing with?

Donna Burbank - who's a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies' long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. "When I talk to our customers, they tell me it's a whole new... thing, for lack of a more technical word. They've heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don't have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don't want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand."

Marcia Metz, a web operations executive at EMC Corporation recently coined the term information liquidity, the ability to freely flow assets and adapt them to different shapes, in the context of Web content management systems. I suggest the same term can apply in the world of financial data, and will show you how key cloud technologies is making this happen.

I predict the data cloud will decimate the existing world of market data. The ability to use information liquidity to move data between collaborating partners will create a new trajectory in trading methods and analytics. This will make the current methodologies look as antiquated as the ticker tape machines of the 1930s.

The famine eating up northeast Africa and threatening 13 million people is probably something you've seen out of the corner of your eye. A terrible thing, to be sure, but life goes on. Well, for some. Now, the World Food Programme has pulled open data from the United Nations, USAID and their own food distribution program and used mapping technology to enable us to visualize the data involved; to turn it, in fact, from data into knowledge, from data points to human beings and from what to so what. The resulting map is dynamic and easy to understand, if hard to digest.

"In the map you can see what areas are most affected by the famine, where food is being distributed, and how much more funding is needed to meet the demand," said Bonnie Bogle, of WFP's partners, Development Seed, by email. "For example, you see that the most affected areas have limited humanitarian access, as they are in the al Shabab controlled sections of Somalia."

A few weeks ago, we reported on some demographic information about the first wave of Google Plus adopters. Bime, the data visualization firm who conducted the study, found that early Google Plus users were mostly young American men working in technology (surprise!). The Bime study used profile data from Find People on Plus, a third-party directory of Google Plus users, except for the age numbers, which were pulled from comScore numbers.

Bime has just put out an updated visualization that breaks down Google Plus demographics including the month of August, now that the service has had some time to grow. This survey covered 10 million users, more than twice the size of the previous one, and some things haven't changed. About 70% of Google Plus users still identify as men, and the vast bulk of them are American. One major shift has taken place, though: While the updated post doesn't have the age numbers (which came from a different dataset last time), the occupation data show that students have overwhelmingly displaced tech workers, though all the same tech jobs as before dominate the rest of the top spots.

Today Tableau announced a new iPad app and a tablet-optimized version of its hosted business intelligence and data visualization solution. "All Tableau views, from both Tableau Server and Tableau Public, are now optimized for touch and gesture experiences when accessed on the iPad," according to the company's announcement.

Version 6.1 of Tableau also brings performance improvements to its in-memory analytics engine, additional maps and French and German localization. More information about the update can be found here.

Many words have been expended covering user demographics on Google Plus, mostly regarding whether or not the newborn social network is dominated by men. The data visualization wizards at Bime have just posted an interactive dashboard of Google Plus data that gives us a much more granular picture.

SAP announced today that several of its enterprise products will soon gain new features for visualizing location data from Google Maps. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and Streamwork were specifically mentioned. SAP expects these features to be available in both on-premise and hosted versions of its applications.

toxiclibs is a library of computation design tools built in Java and Processing. The classes can be used for a variety of purposes, including, "generative design, animation, interaction/interface design, data visualization to architecture and digital fabrication, use as teaching tool and more."

toxiclibsjs is a translation of this library into JavaScript. It doesn't depend on any external libraries or frameworks, but works with Processing.js, Three.js and Raphael.js among others.

People love data visualization; when done well, it communicates new knowledge about otherwise inaccessible information in new and pleasing ways. Good visualizations can be efficient and effective; bad visualizations can be seductive and deceptive. That's why visually designed data-based content, both good and bad, is so popular online. People love infographics.

Today a startup called Visually drew back the curtains a little bit further on its data visualization technology and community. The company unveiled an index of 2,000 data visualizations, a cute Twitter visualization creation tool and promises to help anyone create their own visualizations with a series of self-service tools to be released throughout the year. Interest in the service is so heated that the Visually website melted early this morning.

Continuing our focus on business apps for the iPad, today we look at tools for visualizing data and information. The iPad's interface begs to be used for manipulating visual information, and it certainly delivers. And if you're used to creating charts and diagrams at your desk with Microsoft Excel or Visio, these five apps will deliver comparable tools that you can use from anywhere.