This report shows key technology trends in 2017 through a review of the main themes mentioned across news articles from TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

For a video showing the key insights of the report please see here

Questions Asked for the competition entry

Where did you get the data? Is there anything not explained in the report about the data that the reader should be aware of?

The primary data source is a list of all TechCrunch and VentureBeat articles in 2017 (21k articles in total), a list of which have been published on data.world.

This has been combined with a number of other data sources including search term scores (Google Trends), company stock price data (Alpha Vantage) and Search results (Bing API). A high level overview of how these data sources work together is detailed in the ‘Context/Background’ tab of the report.

Tell us about one decision you made when building the report, for example why did you use certain colors, visuals or features in Power BI?

I wanted to tell the story by taking the reader on a journey through the data – starting off with a high level timeline storyteller view showing an overview of keywords/companies throughout the year. This then naturally leads onto the overview page showing the actual articles where the reader can see which the most popular keywords/companies/search terms were (by various measures of popularity) and use this to filter down a selection of articles. From this page, the reader can go onto detail for a specific company or search term by use of drill-through pages.

Why were you interested in telling this story? 

I find this kind of insight fascinating- I’ve spent a fair amount of time using the report to understand what it is showing about technology trends, the major tech giants and how they are portrayed in tech media! I had only read a handful of the 21k articles myself throughout the year and without putting them into Power BI to categorise/analyse them it would be difficult to spot the trends and patterns even amongst those! 

Contents

(i) Timeline Storyteller-An interactive view using the custom visual showing which keywords/companies were the highest mentioned each day in 2017, viewed over time and by company.

(ii) Overview – A dynamic detailed view of the actual articles (displayed using the stripper browser custom visual) which can be filtered by keyword/company/time, along with a dynamic measure slicer.

(iii) Company Focus [Stock/Article Analysis] – A playable plot of the stock price each day in 2017 for a given company alongside a view of how many articles were written about the company that day (and how positive those articles were). This is for the reader to understand the potential impact the news articles are having on the stock price.

(iv) Company Focus [Time/Search Analysis] – A view of the articles which mention the company over time (including number of articles, Avg. Mention score and Avg. Sentiment Score), the keywords which are associated with the company and related search terms by popularity over time (2016 vs 2017) and region.

(iv) Search Term focus – A detailed view of a particular search term (which corresponds to a company/keyword combination) allowing the reader to see how popular that search term (and the associated company/keyword) is over time, as well as seeing actual Bing Search results for that search term.

Data Set

The original list of articles is published on data.world here

Please see here for a link to an Excel file containing all the datasets used in the data model.

Video Run-through

Click on the button below to download the PBIX report file and data source to explore how the solution has been built!