Did you know? The Doctor has fought more than 300 villains and monsters in his time. Find out who they are – and which appeared most, as well as when they first hit the screens. However, the data doesn’t include villains exclusively in Doctor Who books, audio books and spin-off shows – only the televised serials and only enemies (as opposed to protagonists).

The infamous Dalek has appeared more times than any other Doctor Who villain.

This particular data was sourced from: The Guardian Data Blog.

Data Format: (Online) – Google Spreadsheet.

Click on the image below to access the dashboard.

The study is based on 150 Fortune 1000 companies and thus the results are very vague. That said, the study comes up with some interesting findings. With a 10% increase in the usability of its data, the average Fortune 1000 company from the sample could increase their return-on-equity by 16%. Some of the other key finds are neatly summarized in the stylish infographic we found on ReadWriteWeb below.

The study further highlights the need for companies to turn their data into dollars. Bime lets the small guys unlock the value of big data!

Start analyzing now. Sign up for a free trial (no credit card needed).

SOURCES: The University of Texas and Sybase, ReadWriteWeb

This ‘data explosion‘ is one of the reasons companies need tools like Bime – new innovations have enabled more and more data to be managed and supported, and this data needs to be analyzed in order to produce value for an organization.

Start analyzing now.

Click the image to enlarge

SOURCES: Cisco; comscore; MapReduce, Radacti Group; Twitter; YouTube

A collaboration between GOOD and Oliver Munday, in collaboration with IBM.

The graphics below are only images, if you open the dashboard in the web player in your browser these visualizations are interactive and using the row selector tool, more information can often be examined. To access the interactive dashboard click here. The only measure shown from the original data-set was the fee amount. The remaining averages, calculations and queries have been executed within Bime. In Bime you can easily distinguish between the attributes by assigning a color, thus, throughout our dashboard red=English Premier League and blue=French Ligue 1. Throughout the dashboard, ‘N’ refers to the number of transfers. Thanks to the concise way we were able to display the data, and by querying the wider dataset, a number of conclusions can be drawn.

The first conclusion to draw is that the Premiership is a bigger money league, something often assumed, but now clear to see. The average fee in the Premiership is €6.6m, against €3.8m in Ligue 1, and the distribution of fees is startling. In Ligue 1, only Pastore (€42m to PSG) arrived for more than €12m, while the Premiership saw 21 players move over that price. The discrepancy is even bigger if PSG and the funding from their new backers is taken out of the equation; without this, the average fee drops to €3m, and the highest fee, in or out, would have been €12m – and he (Gervinho) went to Arsenal. In Bime, queries can easily be adapted, such as with the example above (L1 clubs without PSG). This can be performed using groups, and including / excluding the attributes or measures you wish to include in the query.

In total, €198m moved within the Premiership, which had a net spend out to lower domestic leagues of €70m, and sent €149m net abroad. The most expensive market was internal, averaging €9m per player (possibly reflecting the much touted ‘English player premium’). Conversely, the majority of Ligue 1′s outside spend was domestic, with €32m net staying in France and only €14m going overseas. In Bime, using color weighting (and also if needed but not shown below, size weighting) on a range of different visualizations, we are able to show several different measures on one chart. The pie charts below, taken from the dashboard, show both where transfers were made (segment) and average transfer fee (color weighting).

Other differences in approach can be seen – players are twice as likely to move on a free in Ligue 1, with the area treemap (below) showing the clubs who did the most free transfer and loan moves. While the domestic loan markets are fairly even, with both leagues mostly sending out their younger players to lower domestic leagues to gain experience, the Premiership is nearly six times more likely to send players overseas for a spell, Arsenal picking up plane tickets for seven players, Chelsea for four, and Liverpool and Manchester City three.

The effect of PSG’s newly fattened wallet may be a cause for concern in France, as the massive cash injections at City and Chelsea were in England, but we will have to wait and see if this is the bellwether for a change in approach in Ligue 1. As things stand, Ligue 1 may be seen as a ‘junior’ league within Europe, but with UEFA’s financial fair play rules coming into view, the less bloated finances of the French league (see the bubble chart below) combined with the possibility of soon leap-frogging Italy in the rank co-efficients, may be a recipe for longer-term stability as Ligue 1 teams are able both to attract, and hold onto, important players.

With the exception of PSG French clubs tend to spend well within their means. Click the chart to view a fully interactive dashboard to see which circles belong to which clubs.

The dashboard summary of the summer transfer window highlights how Bime can take complex and large amounts of data, manipulate it and display it in an easy-to-digest way with some stylish looking visualizations. To explore how Bime can transform your data, sign up for a free trial (no credit card required!).

Access the dashboard here

Authors: Philippa Booth & Jonathan Gardiner

This infographic from GetSatisfaction is the latest to try to put all the figures into perspective. Dig into the data presented below to discover how much data is harvested by different industries, and how much that data may be worth.

BI and HR share one key aim; to best utilize and organize the resources available to them. In HR this involves initially selecting the best personnel often out of a large pool of candidates and then ensuring they are focused, motivated and productive. Parallels can be drawn with BI whereby it is key to identify the most relevant and useful data and then transform it into something useful. Thus the next questions are: where within HR and how to utilize BI?

Without BI finding the best candidates could turn into a game of Guess Who!

Whilst it is true that BI is indispensable for HR departments, it’s often not employed. Why? One of the key reasons is that Human Resources data is often some of the most highly classified in terms of confidentiality, and is often difficult to get access to, even at managerial level. Modern business intelligence solutions acknowledge and help overcome this problem by means of flexible security levels. For example, Bime is sophisticated enough to enable users to filter levels of access to analyses and underlying data, and this is imperative for a HR department with sensitive employee data. One of the most important features of modern BI is being able to tailor access to sensitive data.

Another reason for lack of business intelligence deployment not only in the HR department, but across other departments too, is that previously, traditional forms of BI often required training and special knowledge to use. The recent growth towards self-service BI has made BI easier to use and easier to deploy.

We believe that analyzing the demographics of a workforce could become an increasingly important HR function in the future. Companies, particularly in the more traditional markets, face the problem of an ageing workforce and thus, with the advent of the ‘global employee’, there is often intense competition for the best new talent. Using BI to make sense of this data will give HR a central role in adapting to the ever-changing market dynamics.

Building on this, BI has become a key instrument in analyzing the true value of the human capital within a company, as BI helps link people to a company’s financial performance. HR must analyze the key skill sets and demographics of their existing workforce, assess whether it is best helping them to meet their central business targets and then identify whether HR is doing the correct things to help the company progress. We believe that taken further, BI can be used to predict future personnel trends and used to help draw, stimulate and retain the best candidates.

To summarize, we’ve listed some of the main potential benefits of adopting BI throughout the HR department:

• ANALYZING HR SUCCESS – To link employee performance to financial performance and identify areas for change / improvement and compare with industry benchmarks.
• SICK DAYS AND HOLIDAY – To get useful information and analyze why and when employees are taking a leave of absence. Evaluate any trends for example key demographics.
• ENHANCED COMPENSATION – To understand how compensation impacts on performance, to make sure compensation is level and fair throughout the company and to make sure performance related compensation is in line with the company’s key strategic objectives.
• WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION – Using analysis throughout the company, top and bottom performers can be identified and then moved up or down. This could be used to inform future spending on training and to identify learning needs of employees.

We firmly believe that BI is becoming increasingly useful for a wide range of people. HR can use BI to improve results across the whole organization and this synergy will play an increasingly central role as companies look for new ways to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions.

Click here to see an example HR dashboard or sign up for a free trial to see how Bime could help your HR department realize its true potential.

Sources: Business Intelligence for Human Resources explained, Business Intelligence for HR, Business Intelligence: realizing the promise of HR technology

Similarly worldwide Chrome is increasingly popular. Currently it is still the third most used browser with 22% of the market, behind IE (42%) and Firefox (28%) but experts predict this too will soon change and it won’t be long before Chrome users exceed the number of Firefox users worldwide and continuing at this rate, Chrome may even be setting its sights on IE.

A slight anomaly to this overall worldwide trend appears to be looking at Europe as a whole, where Firefox is almost as popular as IE and Chrome is currently the third most popular browser by some distance.

We were able to visualize some of this data using Bime and have included data on which web browsers our own visitors to the website use; to enjoy click the image below!

To view our other example Bime dashboards click to visit our showcase.

This was the first ever Visual Decision Forum, so the turnout of 170 was pretty good. Well done to the Décideo team (Philippe Nieuwbourg) for this initiative which echoed current hot topics in the BI technology space – datavis and more globally, the Big Data phenomenon (the fact you need good datavis in order to cope with Big Data!).

Datavis – the nickname for the official term Data Visualization – is nothing new for our American friends, who have been practising datavis for a long time now.  Actors in the BI space have jumped on this discipline as it was necessary  a) to modernize data analysis, and b) to find new ways to communicate.

At Bime/We Are Cloud, we are proud to have understood the importance of datavis right from the start, and we have built Bime with this fundamental principle in mind : maximum information, in the minimum amount of space, thanks to established graphic techniques and Rich Internet UIs that vastly improve the reading and understanding experience.

It seems that the big traditional BI players are only suddenly throwing themselves into this niche simply to support their marketing spiels…but better late than never! Anyway, I could not comprehend the level of interest in “Jump” (JMP by SAS) which actually seemed to encompass the opposite of what was being preached about datavis. No big deal though, the forum needs sponsors in order to be able to take place, which I totally understand. Next year I hope to have more opportunities to see practical workshops, such as the one run by Claude-Henri MELEDO, who showcased some work by Jacques Bertin…the French “cartographer” who is practically unheard of in France, but pretty well known in the USA…[editor's note] always precursors without knowing it, the French…

I particularly liked the round table about Data Journalism, with input from Caroline Goulard (Dataveyes) et Alain Joannes, author of the book “Data Journalism”. The session was about strategies for the digital future and the daily flow of information, and how it has never been so necessary than it is today to structure data, in order to create explicatory graphic visualizations that are able to sum up pages of data in a few pixels.  A lot of new economic models were put into perspective for more informative “story-telling” in order to “energize data” (the baseline used by one of the main players present, and rather well put!).

So, well done again for the initiative, the event came at a good time considering the current literature circulating in the BI space.  I think that the workshops will probably mature next year, and those from the school of Stephen Few will also be hosting some sessions… (our team is a big fan of S.Few and E.Tufte… 2 big names in the datavis world).

It would be interesting if the event could organize some sort of competition around the visualization of a particular dataset, such as the ones organized regularly by Nathan Yau, on his awesome blog FlowingData (which is where the image above came from)…the proof is in the pudding!

See you next time,

Rachel.

Cloud Security: what makes a cloud solution like Bime, secure? – http://bit.ly/ir9q79

Cloud computing: How to get your business ready http://bbc.in/dLpGAM

5 practical steps to keep your data secure in the cloud http://zd.net/mEwWeM

Visualize nuclear power plant accidents since 1952 at visualizing.org http://bit.ly/mdIXxG

Why is Cloud Computing Green? [INFOGRAPHIC] – http://bit.ly/kLrwHe

Visualizing Europe: a one day conference on the power and potential of data visualization – http://bit.ly/kGq9jR

Business dashboards: From information to insight http://bit.ly/lKz7GU

Call Center Data Dashboard – http://bit.ly/l7w3ee

You can see what your subscribers are doing with your email the moment they do it. Each time somebody opened, clicked, forwarded or shared the email, a pin landed on the map displaying their name, photo and city. This was made possible by Worldview.

By mapping people’s responses in real time, Worldview offers users a particularly fascinating look at how their email marketing campaigns are performing. You can also share a public version of Worldview without private data so everyone can watch the action.

Are there other dataviz tools out there like Worldview that give instant real-time data visualization? Let us know in the comments!