Former XPLANER Brian Kaas is the big winner in the TAL t-shirt contest. Yay Brian!
A big thanks to the hundreds and hundreds of people who entered our recent T-Shirt design contest! We were incredibly impressed by the designs.
And the winner is… Brian Kaas of San Francisco, CA! His very elegant radio design seemed perfect for the next TAL pledge drive thank you gift.
A slideshow at Slate: “How artists are mining data sets to make you see the unseen…. Display an unwieldy mass of data in clever visual form and you may gain über-insight into questions you hadn’t yet put into words. That is the promise of information visualization, infoviz for short. The field has long helped scientists, engineers, and businesspeople see the unseen as it emerges from complex data: Users may spot promising molecules for pharmaceutical testing, for instance, or pinpoint glitches in a supply chain. As infoviz has matured, it has also caught fire as an art form, its center of gravity edging further from the pragmatic and closer to the expressive or the whimsically profound.”
Visual thinking and design firm moves more than 1,000 spots since 2007
XPLANE was ranked 1,276 on the 2008 Inc. 5,000, Inc. magazine’s ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. The placement marks a significant leap from XPLANE’s ranking of 2,340 last year.
XPLANE also ranked 15th of companies based in the Portland-Vancouver area — up from 38th in 2007. Inc. indicated that XPLANE is noteworthy because of its varied workforce, including architects, designers, journalists, storytellers and comic book artists.
“We’re very proud to have been recognized in the Inc. 5,000 for a second straight year, as well as advancing more than 1,000 spots,” said Aric Wood, chief executive officer, XPLANE. “We have our team and our customers to thank, who together have shown that XPLANE’s practice of collaborating with our clients using our visual thinking methods helps drive breakthrough results.”
XPLANE was founded in 1993 by Chairman Dave Gray with $10,000 in startup capital. Today the company operates on a global scale, serving multi-national organizations, including Microsoft, Intel, Nokia, Oracle, U.S. Marine Corp. and U.S. Department of Intelligence.
The 2008 Inc. 5,000 list measures revenue growth from 2004 through 2007. To qualify, companies had to be U.S.-based and privately held, independent – not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies — as of Dec. 31, 2006, and have had at least $200,000 in revenue in 2004 and $2 million in 2007.
For more information contact:
Hey xBlog readers, if you want, you could go vote for this panel to be part of next year’s SXSW :-)
Shift Happens: Moving from Words to Pictures | People are hardwired for visualization yet we rely significantly on text. Most games, graphic novels, magazines, interfaces, IKEA instructions, and many other forms of communication take advantage of people’s natural visual thinking ability. Panelists will discuss how to leverage visual techniques to improve your games, websites, movies, communications, or presentations.
The panel is scheduled to include Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin; Dave Gray, founder and Chairman of XPLANE; Lee LeFever, founder of Common Craft (authors of the wildly popular “In Plain English” podcast series); and expert visual facilitators and Austin natives Sunni Brown and Marilyn Martin.
“Hofstadter’s law, conceived by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, goes like this: any task you’re planning to complete will always take longer than expected – even when Hofstadter’s law is taken into account. Even if you know a project will overrun, and build that knowledge into your planning, it’ll simply overrun your new estimated finish time, too, Hofstadter says. We chronically underestimate the time things take: that’s why Sydney Opera House opened 10 years later than scheduled, and why the new Wembley stadium opened last year, not in 2003, 2005 or 2006, each of which had been, at various points, the predicted completion date. It’s also why the list-makers among us get up each day and make to-do lists that by the same evening will seem laughable, even insane.”
“Patience.
Google was a very good search engine for two years before you started using it.
The iPod was a dud.
I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus 8 years ago. A few authors tried similar ideas but it didn’t work right away. So they gave up. Boingboing is one of the most popular blogs in the world because they never gave up.
The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly. You friend someone on Facebook and two minutes later, they friend you back. Bang.
But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.”
Awesomeness from Merlin Mann: “’Making Time to Make’ is a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work. It’s designed to help you firewall the time and attention you need to get out of the lite communication business and into your studio.”
“With so many good teachers out there, it’s fortunate they can share their knowledge via video on the Internet. From the funny to the poignant, these glimpses into the lives of teachers and their students will keep you entertained while learning a little something as well. Whether you are a new teacher storing up tips and tricks or an experienced teacher who could just use a fresh perspective, you are sure to find something helpful among these videos.”
“Last night several dozen of us convened at the NextNow Collaboratory in Berkeley to discuss the future of the book. Everyone came armed with passion, questions, and issues about books. More than half the group were published authors, so we were personally invested in the future of publishing. The opening self-introductions became so engrossing that I was tempted to declare the session an un-meeting and throw away Clark’s and my loose script for the evening.”
A creative and innovative approach to problem solving: Statistical surveys have shown that design and visualisation have a verifiable impact on business performance. Visual articulation is important when solving a problem that involves strategic goals and initiatives. At its core, it helps bridge the problem or opportunity with the solution. That is why helping decision makers to think and express themselves visually gives organisations a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Facilitators for the September 30, 2008 London workshop include Pablo M. Ramírez, Client Services Director of XPLANE EMEA and Martin Hill, VP Marketing EMEA for Lawson Software.
Go to www.xplane.com/events to download the registration forms and get more info.
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
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