This €50 subsides is a fantasy from Cycling Weekly. No announcement was made by any local or national public authority, and no sign in the French news about this. Love from Paris anyway.
My guess: take jazz fans on one hand, and Justin Bieber groupies on the other hand. The jazz fans would in general appreciate way more the DW service than the Justin Bieber ones. Why so? Because the 'vector' that describes a jazz fan's playlist is probably much more specific and 'unique' than the vector of an heavily standardised MTV-based playlist. Everyone gets the recommendations they deserve...
OP made it clear: marketers still have to turn to IT guys today to shape new funnel analytics. And it takes DAYS to see new funnels implemented, while it should be a matter of minutes - if only they had the right tools. Also, thanks for saying that growth hacking / coding geniuses are a myth. They don't usually have the skills, but moreover nobody would dare to grant them write access to the app repo...
Treemaps are very powerful during the data crunching phase, but they are not ok for a final deliverable, as they ask way too much to the reader's brain to get understood.
Maybe pie charts are not robust, but as I'm saying in the post, it's actually the best - if not the only - method to represent the contribution of the Top N contributors to a global measure. And only this. It's not meant to let the reader compare the relative measures of different items. If you wish to do so, I fully agree with your comment: use a bar chart instead.
Indeed it's a 101. Thanks for your comments. The only one I would really disagree with is "always represent more than one data series". That's really tough to represent multiple series on one single chart and manage to keep it immediatly readable.
"Certainly the business people who power our economy and command great sums of wealth are capable of such modest feats?" => unfortunately no, IMHO. I used to be a consultant, and I can tell from experience that there's no chance that any tool like R could possibly penetrate an audience of business people... Though, I share that dream with you!
ggplot2 and Tableau are high-end tools, meant for experts. My intent here is to show that an average organization can do a pretty good job with the tools they already have.
The data discovery tech we're baking will actually totally simplify the way people visualize / discover their data. But until it's shipped, I'm just claiming people can use excel. Thanks anyway for your comment.
I think that using gray scales actually focuses the user on more valuable assets on the data visualization. But you're right, it's also a fashion. Thanks for your comment.
You're right, thanks @skrebbel. "Pigeons" were indeed a group of entrepreneurs fighting a new tax project of the newly elected socialist government in 2012. If they were right or wrong, I won't debate, I'm just thinking they did a terrible job in downgrading the image of France abroad.
Non-French-speaking entrepreneurs are welcome in Paris, I can help putting you in touch with good accelerators that can host you and provide guidance. The startup scene in France today is totally fluent in English, you should feel comfortale.
My son was born very prematured (6 month), he was born at Port-Royal in Paris (APHP, French public hospital), the total cost of his birth was 320k€, I did not even issue my credit card ONCE. Paid by public money. Period.