Clear Intelligence Future Presentation Screencam

Here’s a recorded screencam version of the “Clear Intelligence Future: Simple, Seamless, Social, and Strategic” presentation. You can download a pdf version here and the full PowerPoint file, including the Xcelsius dashboards here. You’ll probably want to put it into full screen mode to appreciate the demos…

How to Build a Billion-Dollar European Software Company

Photo: Bernard Liautaud in the mid-90s Courtesy of London Business School, here’s a great presentation by Bernard Liautaud, founder and eighteen-year CEO of BusinessObjects, explaining how he and his team created the first “European silicon valley startup”, growing the company from zero to a billion dollars in revenue, and then selling to SAP for $6.7bn. Bernard is now a General Partner of Balderton Capital, one of the largest venture capital... [Read More...]

SAP BusinessObjects Social Intelligence Prototype V2 Launches

The SAP BusinessObjects Social Network Analyzer came out last year, combining business intelligence with relationship data to create a “social intelligence” solution. It’s a prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center. It can combine information from HR systems, CRM systems, project databases, committee attendee lists, distribution lists, and any other other system that contains relationships between people. The new version will... [Read More...]

Season’s Greetings with Xcelsius!

Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute. How it works: I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”. The... [Read More...]

What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius 2008 SP3?

Here’s a summary of some of the new things in the latest version of Xcelsius 2008. I’ve borrowed liberally from the official documentation that you can download, along with the program, here. New Components Sparkline chart components. The new Sparkline chart is based on the Sparkline chart created by Edward Tufte and provides a method for displaying a one-dimensional range of numeric data in a way that is dense, takes up a small space, and can... [Read More...]

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for iPhone Now Available on Apple AppStore!

The iPhone version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center was (finally!) released today on the Apple iStore, available as a free download Here’s the description of the application: “Your business at your fingertips” With Explorer for iPhone, insight into your business is never more than a few flicks away. Through simple keyword search, navigation and visualization, Explorer allows you to ask and answer... [Read More...]

BI for Baby: Dashboards to Track Your Child’s KPIs (And The Rest of Us)

Prepare your child for the new world of business from its very earliest hours! Trixie Telemetry has released Trixie Tracker, which includes everything an analytic-obsessed parent needs to track baby’s key performance indicators, including: Sleep Tracking Bowel movements Feeding schedule Medicines And many, many more – including support for mobile: How much longer before this application is available for grownups, too? Well, it’s probably... [Read More...]

OLAP is Dead (Long Live Analytics)

The term OLAP or Online Analytic Processing was coined in 1993 by relational database technology pioneer Ted Codd (my claim to fame: we went to the same high school, Poole Grammar). The term was chosen to contrast with OLTP or online transaction processing, and was prompted by some clever marketing folks at Essbase, who wanted to promote their multidimensional database product. Codd was famous for his twelve rules defining the relational model and... [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...]

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...]

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