ReadWriteWeb

Sébastien Pierre is the founder of FFunction, a Montréal-based data visualization company. His company created an infographic titled: "What is Data Visualization?"

We asked Pierre for an explanation about the infographic and how it defines data visualization.

The Google Docs team unveiled an attractive new chart creation tool today for Google's spreadsheet tool. New features include automatically recommended chart types based on the data you've input, more control over colors and imagery, advanced visualizations and the ability to embed dynamically updated charts around the web.

ReadWriteWeb's COO and spreadsheet man Sean Ammirati said the service still doesn't look as powerful as Excel, of course. "Honestly, though, it's getting closer and those visualizations are cool," he says. "I could also see bringing Excel sheets over for some of them." Check out the demonstration video below.

When you have data you wish to visualize there are many options. A recent graphic that made the news involved a depiction of the lawsuits in the tech world. The graphic was in response to prior depictions in an attempt to simplify and convey the meaningful trends of the data represented.

Let's take a closer look at the software package behind that graphic and how you might use it in your next project.

You read "Beautiful Data" and highlighted parts to share with your data geek cohorts. You log everything. Deep down you know there will be metrics in this growing pile.

But have you ever stepped back to reflect on the growing piles of data and wondered how to begin to slice and dice it? You might want to find a data scientist.

Let's take a look at a recent blog entry that caught RWH's eye.

Opportunities to visualize data can turn the theoretical into the actual. Even so, many tools and services that do so are useful mostly to professionals - academics, economists, business people. Paper.li, a young Swiss company that turns a user's Twitter links into a newspaper-like Web page has been spectacularly successful at doing so for the lay person.

We're not the only entity to think so, apparently. A scrum of investors lined up behind the company, including Kima Ventures, whose co-founder, Xavier Niel, recently bought what is, arguably, France's best-known newspaper, Le Monde.

What parts of a city do locals know are interesting, but are off the beaten path of typical tourists? Now that a growing amount of photography has been enriched with public data, questions like that are something we can tackle in new and interesting ways.

Photographer Eric Fischer has created a number of interesting data visualizations using geotagged location data on photo sharing service Flickr. His latest project compares the locations of photos that were taken in major cities by people who have posted there for a short time (tourists) vs. those who post there for a long period of time (locals). The results are striking and fun.

What a better way to welcome our newest writer at ReadWriteStart than to have the fortune of showcasing her work in the ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup? Turns out that Audrey Watters was responsible for writing all of this week's top posts - quite a way to get things started! This week we discus the future of mobile trends, advice for and by entrepreneurs, elevator pitches, data visualization and the check-in wars!

As a recent article in The Economist observed, we are at the point of an "industrial revolution of data," with vast amounts of digital information being created, stored and analyzed. The rise of "big data" has led in turn to an increased demand for tools to both analyze and visualize the information. This bodes well for startups tackling the field.

One new service is Flowing Media, the new company of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, a consultancy focused on data visualization services.

If all your interests and skills were reduced to a scannable set of tags and thumbnails, what would your ego look like?

That's the question startup YouTego attempts to answer with its Web-based app that asks users to spend a few minutes in navel-gazing self-definition to create a snappy page of terms and related images. It's simple, social and actually quite fun once you get the hang of it.

A recently released Google Labs product called Fusion Tables allowed users to grab data from spreadsheets, text documents, PDFs and other sources and create compelling, comprehensive visualizations from a merged data set.

Google has just announced it's releasing an API for Fusion Tables. The API integrates with Google Maps, App Engine, Base Data and Visualizations APIs, as well, to allow for motion charts, timelines, graphs and maps with all the data available and running on Google's infrastructure. The API allows users to upload data from any source, from text files to full databases, and see their data merged and compared in cool visualizations. Surprisingly, that's not even the best part.