Using a feedreader and can’t see the video?

This video went viral a couple of years ago and has had about 12.5 million views, so you may have seen it before. When interviewed later, little Jonny admitted “I was just having nervous thoughts in my mind and thinking about turtles, I found a snapping turtle there that was really cool and I just wanted to blurt it all out.”. Ah, bless!

Also speaking last night was Gareth White, Director of Vertical Slice, a new Brighton-based gameplay research agency. Among other things, he talked about some of the differences between playability and Usability. He showed a clip this hilarious Zero Punctuation video by Ben Croshaw, which highlights the importance of baseline Usability in gameplay design. It’s well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it (contains lots of swearing). Fast forward to 2:20 if you’re in a hurry.

If you like that video, there’s loads more here.

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While Tim O’Reilly mistakenly gave credit for all the visualizations to Fusion Charts, we know better. A mother always recognizes her baby. I bet Google also recognized their Motion Chart.

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I’ve created five categories and a catch-all to capture the solutions and companies (not so much technologies) that are leading the next generation of Business Intelligence. The categories are:

• Analyst tools
• Dashboards
• Targeted solutions
• Open-source and free
• Advanced visualizations
• Other stuff

Naturally I’ve focused on areas of Juice expertise and focus — not coincidentally, the places where we feel BI has neglected end-users. According to a study by the Business Application Research Center, BI end-user adoption sits at a lowly 8%.

I’m happy to take your suggestions (and update the post) for things I’ve missed in these categories or for entirely new categories.

Analyst tools

Tools that make it easy for analysts to pull data from multiple sources, analyze, visualize and share it.

Winner: Tableau, the reigning king of visual analytics tools, has added more web-based functionality to allow for online sharing and collaboration.

Runner-up: Good Data has arrived on the market with a web-first platform designed to democratize analytics. I had a chance to get a demo from the management team and was impressed with the ease of use and high-quality data presentation.

Dashboards

“A frequently updated analytical display that is clear and concise” (via a recent post)…and not likely to draw the rage of Stephen Few.

Winner: BonaVista Systems wants to make Excel a “first choice dashboard tool.” From the humble position of sparkline plug-in vendor, BonaVista has taken a leadership role in encouraging more effective dashboard design.

Runner-up (tie): Two BI companies, Qlikview and Microstrategy, seem to be following BonaVista’s lead. Unfortunately, they may only be dipping in a toe as I found just a couple examples that break from the traditional over-glossy, gauge-riddled dashboard interface.

• Qlikview
  
• Microstrategy
  

Targeted solutions

Companies that serve a narrow slice of the BI world extremely well. The desire to be all things to all people has been an Achilles Heel of the BI industry. The general purpose BI platforms often prove too broad and too generic to serve the unique problems of specific industries or functional areas.

Winner: Wall Street on Demand is a brilliant, below-the-radar provider of information solutions to the financial sector. Their sparse, articulate marketing text and few screenshots hint at a company that knows exactly what they do and deliver high-quality BI solutions. I wish I knew more.

Runner-up (multiple): The following are just a few companies that have focused on an industry or functional segment to deliver targeted BI solutions:

• Quantivo for customer behavior analytics
• Visual I|O for pharmaceuticals
• LucidEra for sale pipeline reporting and analytics

Open-source and free

(I know there is a difference.)

Winner: Pentaho offers an open-source end-to-end BI suite that is a competitive alternative to the big-guys. Of course, the implementation it isn’t necessarily cheap or easy.

Runner-up: If anything should scare the BI industry, it is the possibility of a Google Analytics model extended into more general data analysis and visualization tools. Google Fusion Tables may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Advanced visualizations

Bringing leading-edge visualization techniques out of academia and into the business world.

Winner: Many Eyes continues to impress with high-quality visualizations. They are easy to create and clean in design and Usability. Impress your boss with a slick visualization in your next presentation.

Runner-up (tie): Openviz / Advanced Visual Systems and Panopticon appear to be the two BI vendors battling it out for leadership in advanced visualization solutions. Unlike Many Eyes, these guys lack Tufte-esque sophistication in infoviz design. That said, there is a big difference between creating a one-off New York Times-quality visualization and delivering a toolset that is re-usable in many different situations.

Other stuff to be admired

Free charts with good default design. InetSoft’s Style Chart and Google Charts offer free, embeddable charts.

Jargon-free BI marketing. With few exceptions, BI web sites are densely populated with those awful stock-photography people sitting around conference tables (or worse, the ethnically-diverse V-formation marching at you) and meaningless business jargon and techno-babble. I really appreciate Blink Logic’s web site with its straight talk and clean, readable design.

Beyond the desktop. RoamBI has a great-looking iPhone application that is designed to “transform your data into insightful, interactive visualizations delivered to the iPhone.” It makes the Oracle and Qlikview iPhone apps look old-school.

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At Juice, we were very excited about the public release of the Google Analytics Data Export API. Our product Concentrate has been running on a hackish home-brew Google Analytics export tool since its release last November, and we were happy to be able to relaunch as a Customer Example of the Google Analytics Data Export API.

Today, we are releasing a new, free tool called Vasco de GAPI. Vasco is a web-based tool for exploring the API, for downloading complex slices of data using the API, and to even automatically generate code that will allow coders easy replication of the API calls in question. Instead of describing it in more detail, I am just going to demo it.

I am going to start with a relatively rare but curious functionality of Google Analytics. I keep track of who wrote each blog using a Google Analytics user-defined setting that is set to the author’s name for each specific blog post. Slicing our blog by author can be cool for me as an employee so that I can brag during my yearly review about how many visitors I bring in or what natural search visits we get for free as a result of my posting. For the demo, I’m going to discover the natural keywords that bring traffic to my blogposts on the website.

Let’s get started.

The first step is to authenticate using Google’s OAuth system.

I select ga:keyword as a dimension.

ga:pageviews is the metric I am interested in. The results will automatically get sorted by the first metric, so I do not need to explicitly specify a sort value.

I set ga:userDefinedValue as a filter, and filter it to saluryasev, and select this last week as a reference point.

Here is the list of parameters that Vasco de GAPI is passing to google.

What are my results?

It turns out that of all my posts, the Google Trends API that I put out about a year ago drives the most natural traffic to our site. Hopefully, this will change with a few more blog posts, but this is still rather interesting data. I could target that specific audience with something Google-trendy. On an unrelated note, a slap to my face was that Zach’s name sent fifteen users to my blogposts. Go figure. Sixteen users searched on my last name, and were probably looking for my more popular father.

To get at the rest of the data, I can click the download link at the bottom of the page or, for developers, another link downloads working code that will replicate this exact pull.

Vasco runs using an open source Python gdata wrapper for the API that can be downloaded here. This wrapper is powerful, and I will write another blogpost about it next week. It is plugged into the Google gdata module, and as such allows all forms of authentication available to gdata users, including OAuth, AuthSub, and clientside.

Hopefully, Vasco de GAPI can help all other potential explorers sail smoothly through the API. When it comes to data, Google is just an great company. They have had powerful APIs for most of their major services for years, and while the Analytics API is a latecomer, it actually is more powerful than the analytics interface itself. This sort of openness is something to be envied by all other analytics and web companies in the market.

By the way, please let me know if the explorer theme works well. It was a lot of fun working on a project with a slightly esoteric approach.

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