Archive for the ‘ FreeTime ’ Category

The Hype is Dead. Long live the Hype.

Posted in FreeTime, General on July 2nd, 2009 by asjs
So, you hear a lot less about cloud computing these days and a lot more about “the Real Time Internet.” In a move that should surprise exactly no one, hype factory TechCrunch is going to be hosting an event about the implications of Real Time. I expect to see more of these events, seminars, and camps from the usual suspects over the coming months.
Find out more about the TechCrunch event  here!
Rest assured that Graphient will not be changing its business model or the specs of FreeTime to meet this new challenge head on. Like the Cloud, Real Time is an important concept to keep in mind as technology evolves in front of us. Filtered streams of data are exciting and in many ways important to the work we are doing at Graphient. But true Real Time is still a long way off and the oncoming hype spasm  will likely muddy the waters in many ways. Much like it did for Cloud Computing.
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Context is King

Posted in FreeTime on May 29th, 2009 by asjs

I have an art and design background. One of the key ideas in art (and design) is negative space. Negative space is the area of a drawing or sculpture or whatever that is not the subject. In the illustration bellow The negative space is everything that is not the flowers the vase or the table.

160k in art school education deployed here.

160k in art school education deployed here.

The importance of negative space in establishing things like scale becomes clear when you compare the A and B images. The negative space creates the context for the flowers, and the context in turn helps the viewer infer certain things about the flowers.

The same thing can be true when visualizing data. Placing data sets onto maps creates context around the data. The context allows us to see relationships. Similarly creating a visual timeline out of a list of events (or data points) lets us see better how those events relate by showing us the space between them. FreeTime uses a fixed contextual framework (time) to combine very different data sets. It is this context that allows FreeTime to transform data into information.

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What we’re actually doing here

Posted in FreeTime on May 26th, 2009 by asjs

We’re eleven days to our first Beta and I haven’t really posted about what it is that we’re actually making here.

Graphient is building an application called FreeTime. FreeTime makes dynamic visual time lines out of whatever data or records you have laying around provided they have a time stamp or an identifiable time component.  It doesn’t matter to FreeTime whether this is a database of some kind, or a spreadsheet or a website. FreeTime uses the common framework of time to bring all these kinds of data into one view so the user can explore it better. Because time is a common dimension to data and information FreeTime can bring data from many different disciplines together.

Example uses include really simple stuff like interactive historical time lines, or very complex things like media analysis or longitudinal study analysis. Some people we’ve talked to just want to use it to see what music they were listening to on a particular day.

We see time as a way to create context for the rapidly proliferating large-open-data-sets out there. We’ll be talking more about this as things develop. In the meantime, if you’re interested in being a beta tester get in touch.

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