Mindshare: Total Eclipse of the Heart ... Rate

For users of the Apple Watch, HeartWatch accesses your heart rate data and turns it into a visual dashboard. It uses Apple’s data to give you daily averages, peak readings and more. And, it breaks up the data for your Regular Heartbeat versus your Workout Heartbeat versus your Waking Heartbeat. Using the info, the app can also send you push notifications if your heart rate reaches a certain limit, making it useful both for workouts and general health monitoring.

HeartWatch is a good example of the power of data visualization. It’s not just about painting a pretty picture, but using the visuals to uncover insights that people wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

For instance, this fall we talked about Google’s Frightgeist -- a live U.S. data map that helped shoppers by showing the most popular Halloween costumes in each city.

It all feeds back into a key trend that we’ve been monitoring at Mindshare: Outsourcing Control. More and more consumers are looking to tech to help simplify their lives, whether it’s managing their health, their time or their money. From counting calories to divvying up bills, brands that can help people make better sense of their habits and challenges will consistently reap the benefits.

Naturally, data visualization has also shown to be quite powerful for marketers internally -- helping brands identify trends in faster and more easily actionable ways. That’s why at Mindshare we’ve developed visual tools to analyze everything from competitor data to geographic insights, presenting the info in quick dashboards.

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