visual

Since its inception, YouMail, a visual voicemail service for mobile phones, has had one big problem. You could view and play your mobile phone's voicemail messages online, or--beginning lat June--by pointing the mobile browser to YouMail.com, but messages weren't stored on the device itself.

Starting Wednesday, YouMail has begun to change that with a native YouMail in-box for BlackBerry phones. Visual Voicemail Plus is a free downloadable app that stores your incoming voice messages along with the caller's name, number, and time of call.

In addition to viewing and playing messages in any order you'd … Read more

One of the most common complaints I hear from people with large music collections is that browsing through songs as if scrolling through a spreadsheet is tedious. For these file-hoarding music fanatics, aimlessly browsing through their music library holds the same appeal as flipping through the card catalog of the Library of Congress.

The problem is: there comes a point when the iTunes paradigm of presenting your music collection as a column-sorted list of files is just absurd. Thankfully, Anita Lillie from MIT's Media Lab has based her thesis around a new way to visualize song data and she'… Read more

We Feel Fine is “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The site, created by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris and Stanford computational math professor and former Google employee Sep Kamvar, looks like exactly the result of these two minds combined: emotional data mining with a human touch and an artistic interface -- a particularly beautiful application of moodgraphics.

The site is driven by a huge database that browses the web for emotional expressions around the globe and maps them graphically: “Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ‘… Read more

Some Facebook engineers came up with a visualization of user activity by the social network's 120 million active users across the planet. According to TechCrunch, the concept (named The Palant?r of Orthanc after an object from The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was created at a Facebook hackathon and could be turned into a product. Check the video of the visualization.

In the wake of the recent PDC and TechEd developer events, Microsoft has decided to put some of its key executives out on the road to explain the innovations that Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 have in store.

Microsoft is promoting the next version of its Visual Studio tool set, code-named Rosario, as offering new levels of analysis of the application development process.

On the back of a well-rehearsed pledge to democratize the application life cycle management process, the company is hedging its bets with a set of product enhancements it says will meet the software development needs … Read more

Visual search engine Searchme has a sexy new iPhone app that brings its signature Cover-Flow-like interface to the phone's 3.5-inch display. Search results come in the form of large thumbnails with short content summaries underneath. To browse through them you simply flick your finger across the screen, just like you would with album covers in the phone's iPod application.

The app also supports pinch gestures for zooming in on thumbnails. This lets you see the the details of a page before visiting it in Safari--something that can be done with a simple double tap on any result. … Read more

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more

How would you like to have your own secretary for taking and delivering voice messages? It sure beats slogging through your phone's voice mail menu, especially if you're short on time or if you want to quickly refer to a saved message.

YouMail's new transcription service, launched from beta on Thursday, adds a (premium) human touch to its otherwise free "visual voice mail" service. In addition to receiving automated transcriptions of cell phone voice messages online, YouMail users can now pay for real people to transcribe their messages and send the gist through SMS or … Read more

A Google visualization tool that converts raw numeric data into charts, graphs, tables, maps, and plots has outgrown its initial ties to the company's online spreadsheet application.

The Google Visualization API (application programming interface) previously could construct the graphics only from data stored on Google Spreadsheets. Now any Web-based data source, including databases and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, can be used, Google said.

Google made the announcement in conjunction with Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference Monday. Salesforce.com is adding its own new tools and technology atop the interface so its customers can more easily employ the visualization feature. For … Read more