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 the simple public data sources?

See “Find public statistical data through Google” and this post for more.

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”, and chose the first chart it offered me: the mean number of chickens in a flock, and the % of respondents?!…  

The other problem is that the site uses Adobe’s SVG viewer to provide interactivity — but Adobe is pulling support for the product at the end of this year…

Of course the site is still in Beta. I wish them all the best of luck, but can’t help thinking that it’s part of a solution rather than an end-goal in itself.

At some point, will Google hoover up the different BI 2.0 offerings, integrate them with their existing analytics tools and gapminder? The result would be a compelling consumer-oriented BI solution which could then be extended to enterprise users…

…Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups:

A. “Repetitive now”
B. “Bored now”
C. “Urgent now”

The “repetitive now” user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.

The “bored now” are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don’t offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.

The “urgent now” is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.

The categories work well for corporate use of BI. “Repetitive now” is clearly equivalent to production reporting and dashboards. “Urgent now” describes a power user responding to an executive request. “Bored now” doesn’t quite translate, but it could be considered the equivalent of an analyst digging for trends when not busy responding to urgent requests.

Just as personal search has ushered in new interest and investment in corporate search and text analytics, I believe that personal and mobile BI trends will have a great influence on corporate BI in the future.

• 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 for verifying listing information submitted by users, such as a merchant might enter when providing data to the Google Local Business Center about his or her business.”

• Information feeds: InformationWeek talks about how Twitter can be used to provide real-time information feeds:

“Twitter users send and read messages using a variety of channels: The Web, SMS, instant messaging, and RSS. The service also has an API for building third-party applications, which are springing up like weeds. These include applications to provide weather reports, tell the status of various lines on the London Underground, and provide earthquake information for Silicon Valley.”

• Data storage and linking: Freebase’s contributors are:

“collecting data from all over the internet to build a massive, collaboratively-edited database of cross-linked data.”

• Collaboration: Trampoline Systems aims to:

“analyse data from enterprise information systems such as email servers and instant messenger tools to map social networks, information flows and collaborations throughout the enterprise.”

[more from vecosys]

“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 users near the user location, and may be provided to the remote device in response to a request from the remote device.”

In theory, this could include “consumer BI” queries such as:

• “the three closest restaurants with a Zagat’s rating of over 16″
• “the closest gas station with below-average price per gallon”
• “a dentist within 10 miles that has no complaints on the web”

From a business point of view, an area sales manager could automatically be provided with the latest figures for a customer or sales office as soon as they got within a certain distance of that location.

[UPDATE: it looks like this is happening. More on Google's plans in this article]