Maskar Design: making visual sense of a ‘zillion bits of data’

Maskar Design data visualization of City of Philadelphia budget as the January portion of their Curious 2011 calendar.

The City has a ‘zillion bits of data,’ says Kate Maskar, but until it’s all pulled together and put into context, most of it doesn’t have a lot of meaning.

One of the best examples of Maskar Design, of which Kate is president and founder, doing just that isn’t even a core part of the Rittenhouse design shop’s portfolio.

Last year, Maskar, 52, and her team of six created a data visualization calendar [Beware: 9MB PDF], it was so well received, that the firm launched a second version, Curious 2011. Featuring a different visualization for each month, from the City of Philadelphia budget to the process of making bagels, Maskar is selling the calendars for $10 and $5 for each additional copy. It’s early enough in the year for the calendars to still be worth it.

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Azavea wins $150k NSF grant to develop GIS speed processors

In a world in which technology is being chased into the clouds, Azavea‘s calling card is still local.

The geospatial analysis work from the Callowhill software development firm formerly known as Avencia requires so much time, memory and processing power that its application are tied to workstations, despite trends in recent years for companies to become more web based.

So Azavea and its founder Robert Cheetham are working for a change that could impact the field and its implications for geolocation, mapping and the like. Armed with a $150,000 National Science Foundation grant, Azavea will begin testing the feasibility of using graphics processing units, a type of specialized processor more often implemented for rendering complex video game graphics at increasing rates. The aim will be to substantially increase the performance of many GIS software operations.

That means the development and implementation of projects that rely on GIS functions can be improved, like its noted Walkshed project.

Read more about the company’s grant here.