I spent most of last week at InfoVis 2008 in Columbus, Ohio. You might remember that I delivered the capstone presentation last year at InfoVis 2007, which also served as the keynote presentation for VAST 2007 (Visual Analytics Science and Technology). Last week the 2008 edition of this presentation was delivered by Christian Chabot, cofounder [...]

On several occasions I’ve taught the principles and practices of effective data visualization to people whose job it is to sell business intelligence software—sometimes for the entire sales team of a business intelligence vendor, but more often for mixed audiences that included a few salespeople among others. In such situations, I can always count on [...]

I’ll begin by admitting that this new business intelligence vendor’s name isn’t really “Lazysoft”, but it’s close. I took the liberty of transposing two of the letters in the name “Lyzasoft” to create a name that describes a fundamental problem with its software—it’s the product of laziness. Some software engineers no doubt had lots of [...]

Recently, Business Objects released a new product named Xcelsius Present 2008. They are promoting this new version of Xcelsius as an application that will “make it easy for non-technical users to create interactive data presentations.” This product comes with ten pre-built analytical templates; novices supposedly can just match their data to a template and they’re [...]

Academic research cannot exist in a vacuum. The ideas it generates must be presented, discussed, promoted, improved, and applied. This requires venues for publication (papers, articles, and books) and interaction (conferences, for example). The venues that exist today don’t seem to be supporting academic researchers in the way that they need and deserve. In particular, [...]