Another Step for Google into Business Analytics? EIM with Google Refine 2.0

Google has announced Google Refine 2.0, “a power tool for data wranglers”. It’s an open-source tool for cleaning and enhancing “messy” data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases. How does it shape up from a corporate point of view? Is this another step for Google into enterprise information... [Read More...]

SAP Augmented Corporate Reality Proof of Concept

[UPDATE: See this post for the soon-to-be released prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center] Here’s an example of “augmented corporate reality” based on the Layar platform and the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand.com platform, running on a Google Nexus One Android phone. These are all screenshots taken from a working proof of concept, shown as an example of the type of functionality business users might have access to in the future... [Read More...]

SAP Business By Design Adds Third-Party Web Services

SAP today announced new collaboration agreements that allow SAP Business ByDesign users to more easily leverage web services from third-party providers, including: Business and investment news. Users can access investment research and other data from Hoover’s, Morningstar, and Business Wire, Google News, and Google Finance, and combine it with their own information about customers and suppliers. Mapping and address services. Users can map and route... [Read More...]

What are SAP, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.com doing with OpenSocial in the Enterprise?

Google has posted videos of all the sessions at the recent Google I/O 2009 developer’s conference. SAP attended as part of the session on “OpenSocial in the Enterprise”). Overall, the session was a little disorganized and meandering, but it did end up giving an overview of what companies like IBM, Oracle, SalesForce.com, and Atlassian are doing to leverage social networking technologies such as OpenSocial within organizations: Mark Weitzel... [Read More...]

Google Takes Another Step into BI

Google is now making it easy to analyze public data sources. You put in a term like “unemployment rate California”, and it will suggest a link to a chart, and from that chart you can start drilling down to more data (see video below). There is also information available on how to make your public information more easily available. How long before (a) you’ll be able to do this within an organization using OneBox? and (b) this is extended beyond... [Read More...]

Google Gadgets and BI?

Google have upgraded their gadgets. How long before they present themselves as an alternative to dashboards?  Read More →

Graphwise: Great Idea, But Needs Work?

Graphwise is BI 2.0 entrant similar to Swivel and ManyEyes, but with a twist. You enter a search term, and the site scours the web for content that contains tables linked to those terms, then proposes charts based on the data in those tables. It’s a great idea, and there’s surely a great future for this technology. But there are currently some issues with relevance — e.g. I put in the search term “productivity”,... [Read More...]

Google’s Three BI Behavior Groups?

In an Information Week article called “Google Lays Out Its Mobile User Experience Strategy”, Stephen Wellman writes about Google’s latest steps in their mission to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”: …Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups: A. “Repetitive now”B. “Bored now”C. “Urgent now” The “repetitive... [Read More...]

BI 2.0 News Briefs

More on how Web 2.0 companies are helping people collect, analyze, and share structured information — i.e. providing some of the functionality now associated with business intelligence vendors. Information display: Google makes it easier to show data on their maps. Data cleansing: Google submits a patent for “online data verification of listing data”. According to Intelligent Enterprise: “The application describes a system... [Read More...]

Google and Mobile Consumer BI?

According to their 2005 patent filing, Google may be interested in providing information to people’s mobile phones based on their location: “The generating of the dictionary data may also include producing data related to the information indicative of the user location. The generated dictionary data may be associated with places near the user location. Also, the generated dictionary data may be associated with common query data from... [Read More...]