Data Visualization From Google’s Data Arts Team

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I don’t know about you but to me cool things don’t necessarily have to have a clear utility, and here’s a great example of what I mean: check out this wild Chrome experiment, a 3-D graph of worldwide Google search volume. This was created by the ‘Google Data Arts Team’… is it just me or does ‘data arts’ sound like a fun job?

Regardless of what you think about Google otherwise you have to give them credit for making it a policy to pay PhD’s to spend 20 percent of their time exploring new possibilities latent in technology that might not otherwise be discovered.

Google Search Volume By Language
Google Search Volume By Language

AppleNet?

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At the moment (May 2011) Apple has approximately $77 billion in the bank. You never hear the company speculate publicly about what it might or might not do in terms of acquisitions with all that cash, which is probably no surprise. That doesn’t keep industry watchers from making prognostications though,and here’s one of the better ones I’ve heard recently.

It’s an interesting read postulating that the best thing Apple could do with this cash cache would be an end run around ATT, Verizon, et al. and spend it on a data-only carrier. Matthew Panzarino examines whether buying an existing carrier or creating a new one would be the best way forward for “AppleNet”. Pure conjecture, but thought-provoking.