Bloomberg View provides this interactive US consumer spending data analytics visualization named How We Spend. This data visualization tool shows how Americans have been spending since late 1960’s through 2010. The author, Matthew C. Klein, uses a combination of trend lines, stacked bar charts and succinct interpretative captions to narrate the story. On the opening screen, it is interesting to see how the spending behavior of Americans has been fluctuating over the years. It is easy to recognize the economic downturn of 2008 as a dip on the graph.

Readers can interact with these series of data visualizations by hovering a cursor over individual data points corresponding to various years to unveil exact percentages. On certain pages users can highlight a category from a group as shown on the picture below. On the screen dedicated to the composition of retail sales growth, food services and drinking places retail category is highlighted. Moving a cursor to a data point shows respective percentages.

Interestingly, despite the rise in internet users over recent years and rapid expansion of e-commerce, online sales have only been accountable for about 10 percent of nondurable goods in 2013.

Data visualization became an integral part of every respectable business intelligence software. Several companies are competing on the market trying to adapt to constantly evolving market demand for streamlined analysis capabilities and slick data visualization tools.  According to Forbes , Business Intelligence platforms are expected to grow at approximately 9% annual growth rate through 2018.

Not every software is made equal. In February 2015 Gartner , a leading information technology research company, released a report assessing the state of BI software market as well as quality of competing companies. Below is a Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform by Gartner, which displays a summary view of competing BI software and their standing in the market.

The solution which found itself ahead of the curve is Tableau which along with being very capable data crunching soft, offers powerful data visualization tools. Among leading BI software platforms which attained highest ranking on the ability to execute as well as the completeness of vision are SAS, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Google Data did not make it to the “leader’s” club. It seems the internet search giant will need to step up its game.

Visually developed this interactive data visualization map which plots dots of various colors corresponding to racial categories of the United States’ population. It is a handy tool to discern patterns of the racial spatial distribution in the country. The map is zoomable providing a capability to see a more close-up picture and get down to a state, a county or a city level of detail. The underlying data come from US 2010 Census Block Data. Each dot on the map corresponds to a person. Users can interact with this data visualization tool by zooming, adding geographic labels and adding or removing color coding.

This is a sophisticated data visualization which is based on the analysis of 100 years of movie influences by Culturegraphy . According to the creator of this cool website, Kim Albrecht, his endeavor focuses on the investigation of  cultural information exchange done via “memes”. This visualization is an

innovative way to study the complex interconnectedness of cultural development. Below you can see movie reference analysis screen when visualized from genre perspective. There are several views which can be displayed on the website and provide interesting insights into complex cultural interrelationships. Although seemingly complicated, this visualization likely mimics actual cultural interconnectedness closer than standard aggregation tools or rankings.