No, it’s purely based on the Google Sheets/Drive API. Doesn’t require you to install a plugin, just share your sheet with data@datawrapper.de or set it to public and you’re good to go.
@david this looks great. On the mapping viz features, I quickly glanced and saw squares for thematic and choropleth designs. Hexagons are well-suited for this and can convey a denser amount of information:
https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/insider/thematic-mapping...
Have you had many requests for the ability to add data to a narrative from datasets? We built this for seekwell (https://doc.seekwell.io/stories) and people really like it for daily or weekly text based business updates.
I'd think this would be useful in media for a story they want to keep the numbers live in.
Definitely - all Datawrapper visualisations can also be used with live data sources (https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/317-live-updates-over...). It used to be a bit of a fringe feature for things like elections or sports events, but since Covid reporting started it became a very dominant use case.
Is there an API to get charts to/from a site without having to go through the Datawrapper site to generate? Especially on Google Sheets-linked charts. Would be nice to one-click generate new charts through an embedded API on our site.
Hi, do you allow startups to embed this into their product to offer to their customers as a chart builder solution without requiring them to create their own account?like an oem approach?
Hey! At the moment, we solely focus on providing the best experience for our direct users, but we have received requests like this in the past, so it might be something to consider in the future. Happy to chat about details (email in my profile) if you want to.
The maps are rendered live (not as images), which is needed for responsiveness, but they are not draggable/zoomable. This is a product decision based on the explanatory/storytelling nature of the feature, we go into more detail here: https://academy.datawrapper.de/article/216-why-its-not-possi...
Thanks for the insight! Though the fact that understanding this requires me to learn two new acronyms might hint at the problem with customer adoption and perception.
I don't think we use those terms in public. We use charging network provider or something for EMSP and operator for CPO (Charging Point Operators). I'm also used to lots of very techincal dicussions on this subject where everyone understands them. Every now and then someone adds in a new term to mean one of the normal terms because of some new thing.
When you onboard to our company you have to learn so many acronyms.
FYI, this setup would be extremely beneficial to gigantic companies and likely would lead to immense consolidation, since effectively you would tax 1% on every supplier transaction down the chain, whereas the vertically integrated gigacompany would only pay 1% once.
This doesn't change the fundamental fact that a tax on every transaction disincentives B2B transactions and therefore directly incentivizes large, vertically integrated companies.
You can try to work against it by arbitrary progressive taxation thresholds, but this doesn't change the underlying mathematics.
Also, there's a reason why progressive taxation isn't widely implemented for corporations, because it's very easy to circumvent by splitting up and increasing the number of legal entities. A sensible way around that is taxing the _ultimate beneficiary_ rather than the company itself (i.e. the owners as natural persons), which is what GP suggests with "sales tax and personal income tax on salaries and distributions".
> This doesn't change the fundamental fact that a tax on every transaction disincentives B2B transactions
You can make the same argument about VAT. There is a cost on every transaction (split payment, money is frozen until you get a return). The incentive would be negligible comparing to other incentives for vertically integrated companies.
> progressive taxation isn't widely implemented for corporations, because it's very easy to circumvent by splitting up and increasing the number of legal entities
> sensible way around that is taxing the _ultimate beneficiary_ rather than the company itself (i.e. the owners as natural persons), which is what GP suggests with "sales tax and personal income tax on salaries and distributions".
It doesn't work in practice, because of tax heavens. Also, I can have a travel blog and a youtube channel when I review cars and clothes. Would I pay close to 0 in taxes.
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All taxes are bad, but given current global world, revenue tax seems to be better, hence the digital tax in EU.
You'd tax global profit based on the local revenue fraction. So if the corporation has global profits of 1M and the revenue is 90% in country A and 10% in country B, then country A taxes 0.9M of profit and country B taxes 0.1M of profit and neither has to care where the corporation is located 'for tax purposes'.
Revenue is simply what you earn regardless of your costs. If some kind of business generates lots of revenues but has costs that are similar, then...they are screwed. You are basically proposing taxing money that moves through any company, regardless of the amount of money that has to pass out of it. Many companies just couldn't afford to exist anymore, we'd go back to hunting and gathering because even farming would no longer be economically viable.
Oil companies have huge capital costs to find and extract resources, if you look at what their profits are compared to their costs of doing business, then obviously taxing revenue isn't going to work.
This is a strange analysis. "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the business, or any other real-world metric).
facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined.
> "Number of acquisitions" seems like a weird metric, without accounting for their significance (in purchase price, impact on the business, or any other real-world metric).
This comment sounds like the nirvana fallacy striking again.
There is no perfect metric for measuring something like overall market dominance.
Thanks to a series of supreme court rulings, the traditional approach has been to look at consumer harms. But that metric alone fails to account for the way modern large conglomerates make money: not by gouging the consumer, but by dominating entire industries.
So how else can you look at it?
Acquisition are just another lens. Is it an imperfect lens? Yes, of course. I challenge you to find an analysis that isn't.
But is it still meaningful? Yes, I absolutely think so! It is undeniably the case that these tech giants have used acquisitions as a way to protect their market position. So it absolutely makes sense to analyze their behaviour from that perspective.
Furthermore, this is a news article not a whitepaper. Yes, there is an enormous amount of nuance in this kind of argument, and if you were prosecuting these guys for antitrust violations in a court of law, you'd probably do a deeper dive.
> facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined.
How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat.
> How do you know that? There's simply no way to know how some of these companies would've fared because these anti-competitive practices have ensured that promising startups are smothered before they become a threat.
Exactly, and adding to that: what about the tons of smaller companies/startups bought for a unique technology that was implemented under the hood across major products of the tech giants? We don't know about them except if some former employee leaked it, most projects will be private/secret and the public at large will never heard about the impact.
Think lots of small "Doubleclick"-ish companies that were bought for a small set of features that were then transferred to major products.
Alot to agree with here - how would Google have faired without being able to strategically acquire companies that made specific tech for ads and search?
Google buying Doubleclick helped them crush the ad market for publishers.
Number of acquisitions is interesting, though, because you can also phrase it as "number of potentially viable independent companies that no longer exist". We are better off with more independent companies.
They all learned from MS. MS tried to buy Netscape but didn't offer enough and got turned down. So MS set out to use its position to boost its own browser instead, anti-trust followed because it was obvious MS was using its position to muscle out an independent company.
For the big Tech companies now, small acquisitions are win win wins, they get the people, they get whatever was developed and they permanently avoid Microsofts Netscape situation.
That being said, I'm guessing no small number of these startups were setup with the express purpose of being bought out like this.
> For the big Tech companies now, small acquisitions are win win wins, they get the people, they get whatever was developed and they permanently avoid Microsofts Netscape situation.
I have a theory that this is why MS treats its research division staff and interns so well. It reduces the amount of competitive pressure MS would face if they were all working elsewhere/on their own startups.
Many corporate acquisitions have the sole purpose of killing off/absorbing companies early, before they gain traction in the market and become viable competitors.
Focusing on real world metrics will give a very incomplete picture of the impact acquisitions might have had on the market.
> facebook buying Instagram was probably more significant than all the other acquisitions combined.
Deja News was probably the biggest tech acquisition by a FAANG company. The average white collar worker spends ~6 hours a day in their Gmail, and about 5 min a day using search.
As someone intimately familiar with that software, I doubt this. Every line of the Gmail delivery stack is home-grown, but if you were to identify an acquisition that most influenced the project it would be Neotonic, not Deja.
I mean, the UI/theme was clearly borrowed, but that's not necessarily any indication of the backend implementation. And they probably both use bigtable, but so did basically everything customer facing at the time.
Yeah, this is the version I remember also. PB has said many times that he built the first version that could only display threads of his own email in a day. But going from a series of raw email messages to an email thread that can be displayed conversationally on the web is a multi-year project, so clearly there was some already existing code doing the heavy lifting.
E.g. the email parsing code in Thunderbird dates back to at least the late 80s, and even after decades of working on it at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, it's still a work in progress.
It makes some sense. The more acquisitions, the higher the chance of doing well (that wording doesn't apply to price) in the metrics you mention. Especially if the perspective is extrapolating the past to the future.
The thesis of the articles seems to be: Big tech will stay dominant because they will keep buying lots of companies and they will likely continue to win with some. To stop this, blah blah law changes or something (I only skimmed the article).
Yes, I would have wanted to see the graph of acquisitions weighted by purchase price but that data is hard to find for many acquisitions. Impact on business (e.g., revenue contribution) would be even better but requires subjective judgment and estimation.
Let's do some simple (and probably wrong, but hey) maths:
- House price: 450K euro
- In Europe you usually need around 30% of the house in cash (20% for down payment and 10% for paperwork and the like). This means you need 135K euro saved. Saving 18K euro/year => you need to save money for 7 years
- Now you get a mortage for the 70% of the 450K euro (315K euro). Now depending on how much you want to pay every month, we get different outcomes. Let's say you are willing to pay 1500 euro/month of mortage: this means (roughly) you will be paying your house for around 17 years
- This all implies you will be earning 60K euro (or more) per year over the next 24 years of your life. Let's say you are at this moment 25 years old, so you'll get your house paid when you are 50.
This is the panorama for people who are supposed to be the top 10% tier in the society (in terms of gross income) in a country like Germany (but applies to any other western European country as well). Not bad, but not good either.
> top 10% tier in the society (in terms of gross income)
According to this statistic[0], that should be 39.1% (numbers are for net income, but top two brackets should fit 60k gross income). In a household with two working people that both have semi-decent jobs you'll have that (and with tech job + basically any other job, you'll beat that).
> Let's say you are at this moment 25 years old, so you'll get your house paid when you are 50.
Yes, that sounds about right, and from what I can gather isn't too different from how it worked in my parents generation. What do you expect? That you can pay off a house in 10 years?
my grandparents both were classical workers (so apprenticeship for men, nothing for women) and bought their houses, paid off 'til their 50ies (middle income bracket I guess). My parents were academics (probably upper third income bracket), paid off their house 'til their 50ies (my mother converted to housewife after buying the house!). Now, if I were to buy the house my parents live in, I'd have to pay around ~1.5M€ I guess. Not sure how I should do that (with a partner and kids) 'til 50, even being a tad higher in income than my parents.
That being said: after the war, housing was destroyed and had to be rebuilt, nowadays it's there already (and more than enough if I look at my family and others around us). The only problem is that now one doesn't need the lower third of incomes to build it and so it has become a playground for financialization games which basically make sure that wealth will steadily be reallocated one family with too many kids at a time...
Well the money still needs to be paid at some point. If you go the 10% deposit route, you will get slightly worse interest rates and overall higher monthly payments. Payments that you need to maintain for ~20 years…
That is mad. On a 500,000 EUR house, 50,000 EUR goes to realtors and lawyers?! What on earth are they doing for that kind of money? Is that including some large tax?
In the UK, you wouldn’t pay more than a few thousand for a lawyer and associated conveyancing fees, and the vendor pays the realtor (usually in the range of 0.5-1.5% I believe).
We do have stamp duty (tax) which can be substantial eg 15,000 on a 500,000 property.
When I bought a 250K€ apartment in the Netherlands, my total cash outlay (down payment plus costs) was around 40K€. Anecdotal point supporting those pointing out that owning a 450K€ home in Europe is indeed still within reach for someone saving a modest amount each year.
Well, assuming everything goes according to plan we are reaching the peak and housing will have to go down again. I don't know when this will happen, it could happen within 5 years, it could happen no earlier than 10 years.
I don't care about past performance, I'm only looking at the future and unless there will be a future building boom in the cities to increase supply(spoiler alert, it won't because a million reasons) and unless there will be a sharp drop in internal and external immigration to the cities with jobs, prices will keep rising.
It's already rising in the US, if the central bank figures out how to meet the 2% goal year over year it will raise the interest rates in a few years. Probably not before 2024 though.
Especially when the populational trends imply that demand for housing will go down on the distant future. Future performance is almost guaranteed to decouple from past performance at some point.
Your points are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
I'm not looking at any undetermined future point in time, if I'm ranting about housing prices it might be not unrealistic that I'd like to buy one in the next few years - and I've seen absolutely zero indication that the prices would suddenly drop by 20-40% to the point where I'd call them reasonable, like 15 years ago.
The incredible increase in house prices tracks a dramatic decline in interest rates. Interest rates were at 1% last year, below inflation! I have no idea how interest rates will change in the next few years, but I do know they will not decline at the same rate as over the past 10 years. As soon as they go up, the prices will decline.
Things will be different on the far future. The exact point when it will change is a matter of speculation, and all the warnings about timing the market apply. You implied a high certainty that nothing will change, ever, and talked about 15 years things.
There is a high likelihood that nothing will change in 5 years (even though COVID19 reduces those odds a lot, because a bunch of people just died). And there is very high likelihood that things will change a lot in 40 years. Time things at your own risk.
not everywhere. and there's some evidence that big corps are buying up houses and becoming mega-rentiers. always a chance these companies could collapse and then the market would be flooded with houses as they liquidate.
It's almost funny how this is the polar opposite of what you often want when hiring. You're hiring to add manpower to tackle the kind of unexciting tasks that you don't naturally find people drawn towards from your existing team (and then, people's responsibilities expand, or they turn 'boring' work into interesting work by redefining the problem or attacking it on a deeper level).
When you have a growing business, money is probably not not the primary concern, but the last thing you can afford is someone on the team being picky about which tasks are beneath them.
No judgment here, I understand OP's sentiment, but I cannot remember any situation in my career where 'hire me, I only work on what I find interesting but it'll cost you comparatively little' would have been an exciting proposition (on the hiring side).
I'd put it a bit differently than the OP - for me interesting and meaningful work means that it's actually benefiting society in some way. That would mean that even the 'boring' aspects would have some kind of meaning ("we're trying to cure X" or "We're working to help solve global warming"). Too much work now is just trying to sell stuff to other people, get people to click links, get people riled up so that they're engaged with some social media platform - it's not helping us as a species.
Hire me and provide a steady stream of well-defined work is what I'd settle for.
I'm currently about to abandon a 12 month contract about 3 months in because it's become apparent that the company didn't actually want a "DevOps" position, and I was hired as part of some incredible misconceptions about the regulatory environment they operate in by the managers who created the position.
The problem isn't "being bored" for me, it's feeling like time is passing slowly. I don't really care what if at the end of the day it's a surprise that it's all of a sudden 5pm.
If a company is trying to hire people to do the work that current employees don't want to do then it sounds like they have already hired the wrong people.
As a company grows, all sorts of new problems open up that your current employees might not be a great fit for. For example, you might not need a DBA when just starting out, but when your database reaches a certain size it might make sense to hire one. Or you might need to hire a middle manager once you reach a certain size - but all of your initial hires prefer individual contributor roles. Or maybe you need someone with a strong background in security to be able to pass an audit.
It doesn't mean that you hired the wrong people. Just that your needs are changing.
That's not completely true, part of the German social security is paid directly by the employer and not deducted from the Bruttogehalt. It's about 15-20% in total.
