Gallery: Big Boards and the Rise of Massive Office Screens
MSgt Kevin J. Gruenwald01Walmart.com
*The Network Operations Center for Walmart.com in San Bruno, California, tracks a staggering array of sensitive data, from server conditions to web traffic to possible security anomalies. Photo: Walmart*
02Etsy
*Etsy, an e-commerce network for makers of handcrafted goods, has big boards throughout its office, with different analytics provided to the operations, customer support and, soon, recruiting teams. Etsy tracks clickstreams, site availability, purchase activity and user and member growth on the boards, among other metrics. Etsy has so many dashboards it’s experimenting with more energy-efficient computing devices to lower the screens’ carbon footprint. "We watch these and many other metrics like hawks," CEO Chad Dickerson wrote on the company blog. Photo: [Zhi-Da Zhong](http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2010/talking-tech-for-the-holidays-with-etsy-cto-chad-dickerson/)/Etsy*
Image courtesy of Brickthing.03Panic
*A TV screen, rotated vertically, shows Panic's daily revenue growth, a company calendar, number of messages in the support e-mail queue, progress on the software company's Apple-based products, and local bus arrivals so employees know when it’s time to go home. Panic plans to replace this single screen with a dual-screen setup soon. Photo: [Panic](http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/)*
Images courtesy DC Comics04Box
*San Francisco-based online storage service Box uses three banks of televisions as office dashboards, with two of those banks greeting staffers as they exit elevators. The elevator big boards show information on sales, company goals, industry news updates, directions and capacity information on conference rooms, and traffic and mass-transit information. The other bank, near customer support and technical teams, shows information on website performance and user experience. Photo: Box*
Scott Beale05Gawker Media
*An [array](http://tech.kinja.com/big-boards-and-tales-of-interning-with-gawker-tech-5912780) of 10 big television screens in the New York headquarters of fast-growing blog network Gawker Media shows live unique visitor totals for top stories along with whether each story’s traffic is trending up or down. (The same screens can be [summoned](http://gawker.com/stats/bigboard/) on personal devices, where additional [metrics](http://justurbanism.com/2013/01/17/gawker-media-big-board/) are available.) Photo: [Scott Beale](http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/5246728470/in/photostream/)/Flickr*
06Glenn Beck / TheBlaze TV
*Pundit Glenn Beck’s online media empire, built around right-wing TheBlaze TV, includes at least one big board built off the same Chartbeat system used at decidedly left-leaning Gawker Media. Beck can keep tabs on traffic while pontificating on air, as shown here. Photo: Tony Haile/Chartbeat*
07Readdle
*Readdle, a maker of document and organization apps for iPad and iPhone, has three status boards at its headquarters in Odessa, Ukraine. One displays information on customer support, including number of unanswered requests, total support queries per product, and performance of individual support team members. Another shows the status of Readdle products as they make their way through Apple's review process, including submission date, approval time and new releases. Photo: Readdle*
08Readdle 2
*Readdle's third big board tracks software quality testing via entries in the list-making application [Trello](https://trello.com). As each software product progresses through the development pipeline, it moves from one list to another, migrating from "To Do" to "Doing" to "Returned to Developer," etc. Photo: Readdle*
09Fog Creek
*Like Panic, which it credits as inspiration, New York-based software tools company Fog Creek mounts its big board vertically. Used by the customer support team, Fog Creek's board shows a live view of scheduled customer calls, current items from a shared office calendar, the current versions and point persons for Fog Creek's software products, and a chart showing how many tasks have been assigned to each employee. Photo: [Fog Creek](http://blog.fogcreek.com/big-board-having-fun-with-data/)*
Bacon S'mores! Photo: Judy Berna10NetDNA
*Like Readdle, Los Angeles-based content delivery network NetDNA uses at least one of its big boards to track the progress of software as it goes through quality testing. Software projects move from one Trello list to another as they progress through different development stages, from idea to code to testing to deployment. Three other screens, like the one above, show network monitoring and service availability data. Photo: [NetDNA](http://blog.netdna.com/developer/how-we-built-our-real-time-network-monitoring-system/)*
11Adobe Typekit
*The team developing Adobe's web-based font-licensing system Typekit has a big television in view of engineers’ desks, showing live graphs of total font views, number of users, signups and cancelations, and tweets mentioning Typekit. During daily meetings, the team consults a large-screen view of to-do lists created in Trello.*
