US Open data visualization powered by Flash
The US Open is not only using Flash for their live and on demand video they’re also using it for data visualization. Making data look interesting is probably one of the most difficult things to do but IBM has built a really cool application for the US Open tennis tournament.
The US Open PointStream application (built with Flex by IBM) visualizes match data and stats in real-time to give you insight into the way your favorite players are performing. There currently are no live matches so it only shows the data from the last played match. You can bet on me checking out the app the next time our national tennis heroes Kim Clijsters and Yanina Wickmayer hit the tennis courts.
Hat tip to Read Write Web.
European flat fee for data coming soon
Earlier this morning Vincent Van Quickenborne (Belgian minister for ICT, telco, economy and reform) moderated a debate with Neelie Kroes (Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe). Vincent Van Quickenborne was asking his Twitter followers for questions he should ask her. I asked what her plans were for the outrageous data roaming charges in Europe. Her answer sounded like music to my ears:
This is fantastic news!
Most of the European carriers are owned by only a handful of big telcos (like France Telecom, Vodafone, …) and this should be a no-brainer. But they obviously make a lot of money from roaming and if no one tells them to change their price structure, they won’t. Now that Neelie’s on the case it looks like data roaming across Europe may soon/finally become affordable.
PS: It’s great to see Neelie Kroes on Twitter!
World Cup visualizations powered by Flash
You’re probably not going to believe me when I tell you that this post has been sitting in my draft folder for a while. Especially so now that Mashable actually beat me to it. But it’s true… Honestly ;-) Anyway… It doesn’t really matter since this is just cool stuff that needs to be shown.
If you didn’t know that the World Cup is currently happening in South Africa you’ve probably been living on Mars for the last few weeks. It is one of the biggest sports events in the world and lots of people watch/follow it online.
As Belgium (my home country) is not competing in this year’s competition I didn’t really pay too much attention to the World Cup until someone sent me a link to this amazing World Cup calendar on Twitter. It allows you to look up matches by dates, location, teams and groups.
This is probably the first year that so many people are also tweeting about the World Cup. UK newspaper The Guardian created a stunning visualization for World Cup related tweets. You select a match you want to see the tweets for and the app will play back the entire match. It’s difficult to explain… You just have to see it for yourself.
It’s probably not easy to be in the oil business these days let alone link it with the World Cup but I think Castrol pulled it off. This app is sort of like a dashboard application. It shows you a bunch of stats about this year’s World Cup. For instance, it shows you how many times a whistle has been blown, how many yellow and red cards have been issued, and much more. It also has stadium webcams, the latest news and live tweets.
CNN is also using Twitter data for their World Cup visualization app. It shows you which player, teams or topics people are tweeting about the most. You can replay the past 24 hours or watch a live feed.
On their special World Cup blog the New York Times has an application that completely analyzes the match you select. It shows you the lineups, passes between players, a heat map and an overview of who had ball possession and more. It seems like a small app but there is a lot of data in it.
Last but certainly not least I want to highlight the FIFA website. FIFA not only uses Flash to stream the World Cup highlights, they also built their “Match Cast” application with Flash. Like the NYT app it also visualizes all the stats from a particular match.
I’m sure there are many more Flash based apps out there. If you’ve found one that’s not on the list, feel free to leave a comment. Oh… And ehr… Flash on!
Storing data and files locally with AIR
By now, I’m pretty sure that most of you know that you can store data and files locally with AIR. There are a number of different ways of doing this and fellow platform evangelist Mihai Corlan has a great article with code snippets that show you several of them.
He talks about storing data in a SQLite database, storing ActionScript objects in files, storing assets such as images or video in files, and how to use the encrypted local store. You can just copy and paste the code snippets from the article or download the zipped Flex project file.
Easy data synchronization for AIR with LiveCycle Data Services
I’m sure most of you know by now that AIR has offline capabilities. You can easily create a local SQLite database or even cache external files locally. While it’s not that hard to do, you have to write that functionality yourself… unless you use LiveCycle Data Services. The recently released LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 automatically creates an offline cache for AIR and the Flash Player. For AIR it automatically creates a SQLite database, for Flash it stores data in Local Shared Objects.
One of the things I always hear about LCDS is that it is expensive but not many people know you can also use it for free (yes… even for commercial applications)! You can download a free one-cpu version which is ideal for smaller-scale production applications and proof-of-concept projects. Get the free version right here.
O’Reilly’s InsideRIA just posted a tutorial by John C. Bland II that not only shows you how to install LCDS but also how to get the data synchronization working in your AIR application. I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see how easy this is with LCDS.
One of the posts in my “draft” folder also talks about LCDS… This is just a reminder to myself that I should really finish that article soon :D
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