Stamen – Innovation Talk

San Francisco/Oakland design house Stamen, came in to talk with us Friday, and if you missed it, you missed out.

Essentially the people of Stamen like big, detailed data sets. They take data sets, just excel documents with hundreds of pages of numbers, and run it through a custom Python setup, to create dynamic XML data that they can use to create graphical values. For example, they took all the information for the crimes committed in Oakland on any given day (taken with cooperation from the Oakland police)  and create their own maps (completely open source, unlike Google Maps, yahoo, or MSN) and plugged some graphical data in to create Crimespotting, a fully interactive map used to see all types of crimes, where they occurred and at what time.

They have worked with Digg, Flickr (Yahoo), SFMOMA, Trulia (real estate) and a bunch of others. They do something unique, which in our business can be hard to come by. If you like information presented in new and smart ways, do yourself a favor, and check out Stamen.

I especially like the Flickr video clock. Very cool.

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