Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Information visualization firm Periscopic just published a thoughtful interactive piece on gun murders in the United States, in 2010. It starts with the individuals: when they were killed, coupled with the years they potentially lost. Each arc represents a person, with lived years in orange and the difference in potential years in white. A mouseover on each arc shows more details about that person.

You can then select categories and demographics, which provide comparisons between ethnicities, gun type, sex, and others. Roll over the bar in the middle for a density plot representation.

Finally, specific breakouts on the bottom provide notables in the data and what they mean.

There are many routes that you could take with this data. At its core, it’s a multivariate dataset with many observations over an entire year. But Periscopic pays close attention to the context and the sensitivity of the data. They make the data relatable while also providing a view of the big picture—without stripping away what the data means. See it live here.

People complain about the trains in the United States: They’re not fast enough, they don’t go to convenient locations. This is a chicken-and-egg situation: We are also unwilling to pay for trains that go faster and go to convenient locations. But these antique maps show we could have it much worse, but also that the development of our rail transit has embarrassingly made almost no progress.

Taken from the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, unearthed by Treehugger’s Michael Graham Richards, the maps show how long it would take to get from New York City to any other part of the country throughout history.

For a baseline, let’s look at 1830–largely before the advent of the passenger train. It would take you more than six weeks to get anywhere west of Chicago. Even just getting to Boston from New York took two days. But by the mid-1930s, railroads were being chartered to connect cities all along the East Coast.

By 1857, you can see how the spread of eastern railroads has connected much of New England and the mid-Atlantic. With enough money for a train ticket, you could now easily get from New York to Boston in a day. Chicago is a mere two days from the East Coast. But this is before the first transcontinental railroad was completed (that wouldn’t happen until 1869), so travel times west of the Mississippi are still incredibly lengthy.

What a difference a coast-to-coast train makes. By 1930, you can traverse the entire country in just three days by rail. Here is where these maps stop becoming historical artifacts and start becoming damning pronouncements about our current state of affairs.

Eighty years later, it still takes three days to get from New York to the West Coast by rail. We’ve made zero progress in the speed of our rail travel since 1930. No wonder people aren’t excited about train travel: It works the same as it did during the Great Depression. While around the rest of the world, we see trains setting speed records, we have to be content with our 1930 train speeds. Perhaps it’s time to spend a little more cash to take our trains into the modern era?

Ambulance chasing only gets you so far. Hitching a ride, metaphorically speaking, on rockets funded by private corporations seeking fortunes beyond Earth’s atmosphere is where it’s at for eager legal pioneers.

There are stellar opportunities for lawyers specializing in space exploration. Space law is quickly becoming an integral part of the evolving aerospace industry. These lawyers exist in a tightly knit industry that deals with all kinds of practical issues and some that seem cribbed from science fiction. Depending on whether the space lawyer is in private practice or academia, he or she could handle anything from liability laws pertaining to litigious space tourists to the legal framework surrounding human encounters with E.T.

“Space tourists are usually high-income earners whose survivors can use high powered lawyers–insurability for private space travel flights is a big issue at this time,” says space lawyer Doug Griffith, a former Marine Helicopter pilot now working within the commercial space industry. Like him, lots of space lawyers are veterans. And nearly all of them are space and science geeks who found a way to combine their passion for outer space with legal practice.

Space lawyers even have their own legal journal and university programs. The marvelously titled Journal of Space Law is published by the University of Mississippi Law School’s National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law. Articles in the current issue deal with, among other things, death liability in commercial space flight accidents, international law relating to suborbital flights, and mineral rights for lunar mining. Students interested in space law also have the option of studying in the Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; other law schools also offer space law courses within larger programs.

Surprisingly, it’s not the legal profession’s equivalent of a degree in fine arts. Far from it. Short of bumping into Alf, the final frontier for space law is extraterrestrial mining. Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining venture backed by filmmaker James Cameron and Googlers Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, is entering a legal gray area. “Outer space mining, in legal terms, is the Wild West,” Griffith tells Fast Company. Lawyer Michael Listner wrote an article on the topic that notes no one has truly figured out sovereignty laws for outer space and private, non-governmental exploration—the United States or China cannot claim sovereignty over an asteroid, but private corporations might. Planetary Resources, for their part, claims that asteroids do not count as “celestial bodies” regulated by the 1967 treaty because meteorites, which are asteroids that fell to earth, are not covered under it. If Planetary Resources really does succeed in starting up extraterrestrial mining operations, the value of the minerals it finds might pale in comparison to space lawyers’ billable hours.

Satellite issues, however, are the bread and butter of space law. Satellites handle television transmissions, GPS signals, and a host of other projects for commercial, military and government clients alike. Several binding international treaties such as the 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused By Space Objects, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty address liability and risk concerns over satellites–red meat for these interstellar legal eagles. (Specifics regarding fault for either non-functioning satellites or people or property on the ground hurt by falling satellites depends on the locality.)

Even NASA and the United Nations have put space lawyers on retainer, asking them more recently to update old legal guidelines or create new ones for the occasion that humanity reaches other planets. The NASA policy for quarantining humans who met extraterrestrials while visiting these other planets was created by Apollo-era space lawyers. It was repealed in 1991. The extraterrestrial regulations were part of a larger law primarily aimed at quarantining astronauts who, in those Cuban Missile Crisis days, were feared might bring pathogens home from the Moon. (Sorry, conspiracy theorists!). The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) is an international organization based in France dedicated to space research with experts drawn from academia and the private sphere worldwide. Although the bulk of COSPAR’s work these days deals with GPS issues and satellite law, the organization published a planetary protection policy several years ago that issued non-binding guidelines for astronauts visiting other planets.

Other space law experts have since written papers on topics like international law and permanent lunar bases. Eventually, many more regulations written in the age of Apollo and Soyuz will need to be updated for the era of the International Space Station and SpaceX.

The sky’s no longer the limit for ambitious lawyers.

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Find Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, on Twitter and Google+.

A Danish startup has created a fairly straightforward Web-based application that lets organizations invoice each other online. But humble though it may sound, in the long run, this Nordic venture could well end up disrupting not just the business software industry but the banking industry as well.

That’s because the invoicing application is just the tip of a much larger iceberg that the company, Tradeshift, is envisioning–one that leverages big data to reinvent how credit ratings are set for small and medium-sized businesses.

Its most potentially disruptive idea is Instant Payments, a service which allows suppliers to get paid immediately once a customer accepts an invoice on the Tradeshift system, instead of having to wait the usual 30, 60, or 90 days.

The money still comes with an interest rate, but the size of that rate gets determined based on the buyer‘s credit rating, not the supplier‘s. Which is good news for small- and medium-sized suppliers, which often get hit with higher rates because they are perceived to be riskier bets.

Large companies, however, often have better credit ratings. And when you combine that with the fact that Tradeshift can see that a buyer has accepted an invoice (thereby declaring that they do intend to pay the bill), the risk for Tradeshift (and its financing partners) plummets.

“We can do real-time credit assessments,” CEO and cofounder Christian Lanng tells Fast Company.

Lanng says that Fortune 500s are sending “millions” of invoices through the system annually, and that the overall volume of transactions has tripled since January.

Instant Payments is currently being beta tested in England and Denmark and is slated to be available in the U.S. in the fall. The long-term implications of the real-time visibility Tradeshift now has are powerful. ”You cannot even begin to imagine what big data will do to finance,” Lanng says. “As we get more data on transactions, that changes the whole credit picture.”

Lanng and his cofounders, Mikkel Hippe Brun and Gert Sylvest, came up with the idea for the e-invoicing service while building a similar system system for the Danish government. The initial goal was simply to help businesses around the world become more productive. Invoices are still largely delivered in paper or pdf format, which means parties on the receiving end have to spend time re-typing the details into their own systems. (The Danish government estimated that this cost 15 minutes of worker time per invoice.)

Since businesses of all size and shape share the same challenge, Lanng, Brun, and Sylvest decided to tackle the problem on a global scale. Tradeshift launched in 2010, with Morten Lund, one of Skype’s early investors, helping to arrange seed funding. (Lund is now chairman of Tradeshift’s board.)

The company initially launched just in Scandinavia, Germany, and the UK. But since companies frequently do business trans-nationally, the system rapidly swept across the globe.

Today 100,000 businesses in 190 countries use Tradeshift, including the UK’s National Health Service, the French government, and Kuehne+Nagel, one of the largest transportation and logistics companies in the world. About 2,000 new companies join every week, up from 1,000-1,500 a week six months ago.

With 20,000 companies on the system, the United States has the largest number of users (including Dell and Accenture). India and Malaysia are the fast growing countries, though, and CEO Lanng tells Fast Company India could soon overtake the U.S.

The company won’t disclose the exact number of transactions processed, but Lanng says that Fortune 500s are sending “millions” of invoices through the system annually, and that the overall volume of transactions in the system has tripled since January.

The service is free to use. Tradeshift makes its money off its developer ecosystem. The company quickly saw that the main value they were creating wasn’t solely in productivity. All of a sudden, its databases contained massive amount of real-time data about economic activity that businesses would want to access and put to use beyond simply checking the status of invoices.

About 30 third-party apps have been built on top of Tradeshift so far (with 20 more on the way), Lanng says, including ones that create heat maps of your suppliers and customers and others that integrate with Google Docs and PayPal. In addition to public apps that anyone can use, individual companies can build proprietary apps to use just with their own supply chain.

“This is what happens when you take the Facebook model and apply it to business,” Lanng says. “You get some very powerful business possibilities.”

Privacy is not an issue, Lanng says, because the apps don’t give users access to all the data in the system, only to data relating to their own businesses. “A lot of this data is data they share with their business partners anyway,” he explains. But instead of delivering it manually and partners having to re-key it into their own systems, they can now access it in real-time through the centralized system.

Tradeshift takes a percentage of the fees charged by paid public apps (30 percent, on average) and negotiates independent deals with companies that build proprietary apps.

If the developer ecosystem expands, the Tradeshift model could one day steal market sharefrom business software stalwarts like Intuit’s QuickBooks, as small and medium-sized businesses choose to work on Tradeshift and use its app ecosystem because of the convenience of connecting real-time with their business partners elsewhere.

Image: Flickr user KrissZPhotography

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – The XTS is arguably the most important vehicle launch from Cadillac in the last few years, and to help owners get acclimated to its features – including the all-new CUE infotainment system – Caddy is providing owners of the 2013 model with an Apple iPad.

The inclusion of the iPad is part of a larger launch strategy by Cadillac to reassert itself as the world leader in luxury, and part of that is getting owners familiar with the range of new technologies incorporated into its largest sedan.

Speaking with Wired at the CTIA Wireless show in New Orleans, Mark Harland, Cadillac’s head of customer experience sets a lofty goal for the all-American luxury brand, saying, “We want to be the leader in customer experience.”

To that end, Cadillac is rolling out a series of online and dealership-based educational initiatives to help new XTS owners learn the ins and outs of their new sedan.

“The moment you pull away from the dealership,” says Harland, “there’s this kind of black hole for 90 days,” during which the owner has little to no contact with the dealer.

Cadillac’s new owner-education program aims to change that, beginning with 25 new “connected consumer specialists” Cadillac parent General Motors is hiring to get dealers up to speed on the XTS’ range of infotainment and safety systems. Each of the 700 or so Cadillac dealerships in the United States are required to have two “certified technology experts” on hand and trained by the XTS tech pros. Additionally, Cadillac is setting up a call center dedicated to CUE education and if customers still have issues, rather than trekking to the dealer, a specialist will come directly to their home.

“We need to think about helping owners with the learning curve,” Harland tells Wired. “Even if you get a walk-through at the dealership, you’re going to forget about a lot of the features. And we want the customer to learn about CUE on their own time.”

That’s where the iPad comes in.

Each Apple tablet given to XTS owners will come preloaded with OnStar RemoteLink, MyCadillac and an app that simulates the CUE user experience, allowing owners to familiarize themselves with all the functionality of the new infotainment system from the comfort of their couch.

Going even further, the CUE team will be scouring Cadillac forums, social media and other community sites to answer questions, solve issues and provide a level of support heretofore unheard of in the luxury automotive space.

“We always said that the customer is important,” Harland admits, “but there was no real strategy.” This is that new strategy and expect it to filter down throughout the ranks of Cadillac products in the very near future.

Photo: NASA

We’re less than a week away from the scheduled launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and today the company will fire the engines at the Kennedy Space Center with the rocket firmly anchored to the ground. The static test is somewhat unusual for a rocket seven days before launch, but the test is part of a full dress rehearsal for the SpaceX team. Last week marked the final full simulation between NASA and SpaceX for the part of the mission that will take place in orbit as the company prepares to become the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station.

The launch of the Falcon 9 and Dragon has been delayed a few times since its initial planned flight in February. The last scheduled time was for today. But SpaceX founder and chief designer Elon Musk told us last week there were some final adjustments needed to the software responsible for controlling the Dragon during its maneuvers near the ISS. “It’s been too sensitive to issues and has aborted when it shouldn’t have aborted,” he said from his desk at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. “Essentially Dragon got scared and ran away, when it shouldn’t have.”

According to the release, today’s launch rehearsal will include “all countdown processes as though it were launch day” and “The exercise will end with all nine engines firing at full power for two seconds.” SpaceX will broadcast today’s static test live beginning at 2:30 p.m. ET with the firing of the nine Merlin engines expected at 3:00 p.m. ET.

Following the test, SpaceX engineers will make sure that everything performed as expected and that the rocket is ready for next Monday’s launch. Three days after the launch, the Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to begin the demonstration maneuvers that will eventually lead to the docking with the ISS.

Only the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency have sent spacecraft to the ISS. If successful, the SpaceX mission next week will fulfill several requirements from NASA to become a regular cargo transportation vehicle for the ISS. But SpaceX and Musk continue to emphasize that success is only one of the possible outcomes. “This is a new rocket and spacecraft,” he told us in our interview last week, “the docking system is being tested for the first time.”

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft on its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo: NASA

Musk emphasized the complexity and risk involved in spaceflight last week. But he had the upbeat optimism of an industry veteran when describing the approach to success, dismissing the possibility of failure as just another step. “If something does go wrong we’ll fix it and we’ll be back on it on a subsequent mission.”

SpaceX is one of two companies, along with Orbital Sciences, competing for contracts to deliver cargo to low Earth orbit for NASA under the Commercial Orbital Transportation System program. If it successfully delivers the cargo, SpaceX will have an edge on the competition for flying astronauts to orbit. The company’s Dragon spacecraft (pictured at top preparing for next week’s launch), has been developed to be capable of flying humans into space as well as cargo and is competing with three other companies for flying astronauts to low Earth orbit. Earlier this year SpaceX tested new rocket engines that will be used on the Dragon as part of its emergency abort system for launches, as well as for precision landings upon returning to Earth.

Of course Musk reminded us last week that all of this work is just one of the steps towards his eventual goal of multi-planetary life. His reason for developing all of this space technology is for making trips to Mars, something he thinks could cost just $500,000.

Wired will continue its ongoing coverage of the new commercial space race and broadcast next week’s launch live at our new Open Space blog.

Social media is a global phenomenon indeed. Certainly Facebook, Twitter, Google+, in their own way, each make the world a much smaller place. The distance between any two people is shrinking as the number of network connections continues to proliferate. I’m sure you’ve heard at one point or another, that the distance between two people in an offline world is six degrees. In a recent Facebook study for example, the average degree of separation between two people in the network is only 4.74. When focused on one country specifically, such as the U.S., Sweden, or Italy, among others, the number of hops between two people further shrinks to 3.74.

Social networking is the new normal. No matter where you are in the world, there are social networks that only continue to bring us together. In January 2012, comScore published an interesting report, “It’s a Social World,” which opened a window into the world of social networking. The report contained several key findings, which aren’t a surprise to you or me, but they will deliver a wake-up call to the captains of industry who may be on a wrong course toward the future of customer relevance.

According to comScore, numbers show that social networking is the most popular online activity worldwide.  As you can see in the image below, social networking is a global phenomenon. Social networks for many, are the hub for their entire online experience. They introduce the need for any organization with a content strategy to rethink what they create, when, where and how. In October 2011, 1.2 billion users around the world visited social networking sites, which account for 82% of the world’s population. Most notably, nearly 1 in every 5 minutes is now spent in social networks. Within each network, attention is focused on interaction within the social graph where the 5C’s of Engagement must now account for those who at varying levels create, connect, consume, communicate, and contribute.

But social networking is only part of the story as platforms count for everything. Mobile devices are also fueling social addiction. comScore looked at individuals aged 13 and above and as a result, they believe that mobile social networking is going to be the wave of the future.

For businesses developing country-specific programs, comScore also provided a glimpse into the top 10 engaged markets for social networking. This should factor into your prioritization discussions.

1. Israel
2. Argentina
3. Russia
4. Turkey
5. Chile
6. Philippines
7. Columbia
8. Peru
9. Venezuela
10. Canada

As alluded to earlier, while demographics are important, try to also think beyond Boomers, Generation-X, or Generation-Y. Think Generation-C as those who live the connected lifestyle are injecting digital into their DNA. As you can see here, social networking growth is pervasive across the board.

Nielsen also released a report on the “State of Social Media.” While it mostly focuses on the impact of Social and Mobile technology in the United States, there is useful breakout of the Top 10 Web Brands by unique audience around the world.  I believe that this information should be considered in any social and web strategy. Here are the top 10 sites by country in no particular order…

United States

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Yahoo!
4. MSN/Windows Live/Bing
5. Youtube
6. Microsoft
7. AOL Media Network
8. Wikipedia
9. Apple
10. Ask

Japan

1. Yahoo!
2. Google
3. FC2
4. Youtube
5. Rakuten
6. Wikipedia
7. Microsoft
8. goo
9. Ameba
10. Amazon

Spain

1. Google
2. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
3. Facebook
4. Youtube
5. Microsoft
6. Blogger
7. Yahoo!
8. Wikipedia
9. Elmundo.es
10. WordPress.com

United Kingdom

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
4. BBC
5. Youtube
6. Yahoo!
7. Amazon
8. eBay
9. Microsoft
10. Wikipedia

Australia

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. NineMSN/MSN
4. Youtube
5. Microsoft
6. Yahoo!7
7. Wikipedia
8. Apple
9. eBay
10. Blogger

France

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
4. Microsoft
5. Youtube
6. Orange
7. Wikipedia
8. Free
9. PagesJaunes
10.Yahoo!

Italy

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Youtube
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
5. Virgilio
6. Libero
7. Microsoft
8. Yahoo!
9. Wikipedia
10. Blogger

Germany

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Youtube
4. eBay
5. Microsoft
6. Amazon
7. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
8. Wikipedia
9. T-Online
10. Web.de

Brazil

1. Google
2. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
3. Facebook
4. UOL
5. Youtube
6. Microsoft
7. Terra
8. Globo.com
9. Orkut
10. Yahoo!

Switzerland

1. Google
2. Facebook
3. Youtube
4. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing
5. Microsoft
6. Bluewin
7. Wikipedia
8. Aple
9. Local.ch
10. search.ch

Some interesting findings emerge out of these numbers. First, Google is the top Web brand in each country except Japan according to Nielsen. Second, Youtube is a top 10 online destination in each of these countries. Lastly, Facebook is among the top 3 sites in every country except Japan. FC2 and Ameba are the country’s top 2 social networks.

Revisiting the comScore report for a moment, we can see the overall Internet and Social Networking growth is imminent. As you develop content and engagement strategies for Web, social and mobile channels, consider this…the behavior on the Internet, social networks and on mobile devices is unique to each platform. There is no universal strategy that will cut across all platforms for every community you’re hoping to reach.

This.is.important.

Take a look at the graphic below. The top line in blue represents Internet growth. The bottom line in orange represents the overall of social networks. By reading between the lines, we can actually see a difference in the mindset of customers. The blue line represents the destination Web, i.e. websites, search engines, etc. The orange line symbolizes what I call the Egosystem, a Web experience where information finds people through the connections they make. It is in the understanding of how information travels and how it’s discovered in popular channels and platforms as well as comprehending customer behavior in the destination web and the Egosystem that reveal the keys to meaningful engagement.

So why is this important? In the social economy, there are no strangers, only friends you haven’t followed or haven’t followed you yet.

For global businesses considering any social and web strategies to improve customer experiences and engagement, going global starts within going local. This is not about taking one campaign and broadcasting it around the world from central headquarters—even if it’s translated. This is about localization and true engagement with those who define social networking at the local level. In social networks people do not create an idle global or country-specific “audience,” nor do they anxiously anticipate the next big marketing campaign. This is Generation-C (connected) after all, and they’re connected and among the most discerning groups of customers your business has ever faced. Here, they are the network and organizations, your business, are the guests.

Before you go, I’ve assembled a list with top line thoughts to help guide you in the development of your global, and local, new media strategy…

The Top 9 Reasons to Go Local with Your Global Social and Web Strategies

1. Social Media is the new “normal,” and it is literally making the world a much smaller place
2. Employing a Global Strategy establishes a unified brand
3. Investing in a local presence builds a bridge between the brand and customers
4. Localizing and contextualizing content increases relevance, engagement, and resonance
5. Investing in the 5’s of community completes the last mile to improve customer experiences, increase commerce and promote advocacy
6. Global languages and cultures are extending your opportunity for commerce and community, but localization is the key to engagement
7. Prioritize each opportunity based on local markets that track toward business objectives and language opportunities
8. Think channel experiences and design local experiences to thrive on each platform (mobile, Facebook, web, etc.)
9. Finally, because your local customers and country managers want it that way

As comScore notes in its report, “Social networking behavior both transcends and reflects regional differences around the world.”

Via Brian Solis: http://www.briansolis.com