SAP TechEd Vienna ‘09 Demo Jam

It’s Demo Jam evening at SAP TechEd Vienna – a unique event often described as “American Idol for Geeks” – participants get six minutes to wow the crowd with their innovative solutions based on SAP technology. Mark Yolton, head of community at SAP, kicked off the show with a great video of SAP’s sponsorship of the world 505 sailing championships, and thanked the SAP Mentors for their work throughout the year. Then Demo Jam host Craig... [Read More...]

SAP TechEd Vienna ‘09 Opening Keynote: Change, Integration and Innovation

I’m in Vienna this week for SAP TechEd. This morning’s keynote featured Mark Yolton, Jim Snabe, and Marge Breya of SAP BusinessObjects. The show opened with the obligatory high-production-value-video that faded out to a oh-so-sustainable image of a man walking his dog in a field of wind turbines. Then Mark Yolton, the head of SAP’s Community Network, opened the show with a reminder that the success of SAP is due to the extended SAP community,... [Read More...]

Too Scared to Use the PowerPoint Twitter Tools? Moderation, Updating, New Options

I’ve posted a new set of tools to the PowerPoint Twitter Tools pages. The new features include: Moderated tweets New tool to tweet directly from PowerPoint New “mood meter” tool New voting pie chart tool Moderated Tweets and New Feedback Slide Options Are you scared of your audience? Me neither. But when I recently asked several senior executives if they were interested in using the PowerPoint Twitter Tools in their conference presentations,... [Read More...]

Blind (and Incompetent) Justice Thanks to Spreadsheet?

There was a great story in Slate yesterday called “Errors in Judgment — Were hundreds of criminals given the wrong sentences because lawyers messed up a basic work sheet?”. The background: the state of Maryland established a worksheet that graded the severity of a convict’s crime and his risk to society, and was intended to make sentencing more consistent and the administration of justice a little less arbitrary. The problem? And... [Read More...]

SAP’s Gravity Prototype: Business Collaboration Using Google Wave

Alexander Dreiling of SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia, has posted on a great prototype called Gravity that uses Google Wave to collaborate around business process. Gravity is a Google Wave “gadget” that can be added within the Google Wave client. It lets participants in a wave use the business process modeling functionality of SAP Business Process Management collaboratively, in near-real time. David Cook called it “the best business example... [Read More...]

PowerPoint Twitter Tools Update: Make Some Noise!

New versions of the PowerPoint Twitter Tools, built using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius, are now available. If you’re using the PowerPoint template with the embedded widgets from this web site, you will automatically get the new versions. To access the new tools, download the PowerPoint templates from the main page. More detailed instructions are available here. New tool: PowerPoint Crowd Meter When you want to take a break from using Twitter for... [Read More...]

Integrating Live Twitter Streams into PowerPoint Using Xcelsius

As a frequent presenter, I’ve been wanting to add some more interaction to presentations for a long time. A couple of years ago, I used some .php code I found on the web and an early version of Xcelsius to display a ticker bar during the presentation that contained the subject lines of emails sent to a particular address. And after some frustration, I even managed to put together a simple voting-by-email service that was adapted by the BusinessObjects... [Read More...]

Web 2.0 Presentation Tools from SAP – Integrate Twitter into PowerPoint!

In today’s web 2.0 world, sometimes the presenter on stage is the only one who doesn’t know what the audience is thinking – because everybody else is viewing the Twitter stream. These new prototypes fix that problem, allowing you to give presentations in web 2.0 style, with the comments from your audience appearing directly on the screen, in real time, during your presentation! Based on the SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius dashboarding technology,... [Read More...]