Chris Crosby

I came across a clever demonstration of Analytics from a Business Intelligence software provider called QlikView, and thought it worth sharing. Note- In an indirect way, Latigent competed with QlikView and I always admired their clever marketing campaigns. In this application of their analytics tool, they dumped radio airplay data from  MediaGuide.com into an OLAP cube and overlayed the QlikView front end (demo found here).

Originally I just wanted to play around with the data, so I filtered based on the greatest band of all time, Van Halen.

Unexpectedly, a couple of things struck me about the results:

1. The top two most played songs both appear on the album 1984, but 1984 is the second most played album: Seems a bit counter intuitive at first, but upon closer inspection we discover that the album Van Halen’s songs may be played fewer times, but there are more of them. The aggregate is greater by more than 300 song plays. There is a lesson to be learned here about product distribution, and a pretty good example of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory in action.
2. Why the big disparity between the “David Lee Roth Van Halen” and the “Sammy Hagar Van Halen”? My assumption is that this is most likely because Van Halen is on tour right now with David Lee Roth. No doubt radio stations are heavily promoting this tour by spinning the vintage favorites. My hypothesis though is one that is impossible to prove given the current data set. One would “just need to know” that these guys are on tour to draw that conclusion. Without this information, what conclusions would you draw? Would they be accurate? Is mine accurate?

Now, an interesting exercise would be to take the chart below that displays where these songs are being played and overlay the tour schedule. Also, the data is only available from Feb 24, 2007 to current. What would a wider data set show us? Is the distribution reversed when they’re on tour with Sammy Hagar? What about when they’re not on tour?

This example demonstrates that the unlocked power of analytics is not just about spotting trends that you otherwise would not have, but its often in finding and qualifying external (and sometimes non-structured) data points and quantifying their impact. It also causes you to ask questions and seek answers that you otherwise wouldn’t: What long tails are hiding in your data? How can you leverage them? What external events influence your business? How do you qualify them, and quantify their impact?

What else do you not know you need to know?

Looks like Pentaho closed a $12M Series C round of financing. This is exciting stuff. With the consolidation of large Business Intelligence players its opening the market for the already under served SMB and for Enterprise BI projects looking for a lower cost of ownership.

The only real question is if these guys will join the ranks of Zimbra and become a promising start-up swallowed by a behemoth too soon…

“The process of discovering what you don’t Know you need to Know.”

-Chris Crosby

OK, so the title is a bit overstated, but now that I have your attention:

A couple months ago Google [quietly] released a hosted charting API. Albeit it lacks the sex appeal of their big splash products like GMail or Google Docs, it tapped my imagination.

The basic concept is that your application passes parameters to a URL hosted at Google. It allows you to define things like chart type, size, colors, data values, etc. For example, hitting this URL,

 http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World

returns the following image:

Part of the reason this grabbed my attention is that its very similar to Latigent’s BlueVue (now Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite ((CUIS))) “API” for accessing reports & charts from other applications (except you don’t actually pass the data to CUIS, since that’s the real point of having a full blown BI App What I find amusing here is that Google, whether intentionally or not, has basically entered into the 3rd party control business. Very few people ever build their own charting control as its not core to their application, and there are inexpensive alternatives to coding your own. Google just introduced another inexpensive option. Now, I seriously doubt that Google will ever cut into the market share of guys like Dundas, but it could certainly address the needs of some low-level apps.

Expanding on this hosted API/3rd Party Control concept, it’s reasonable to think that a creative developer could duct-tape together the APIs from Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Reader (unsupported “API” here) and Google Search Appliance to come up with a rudimentary and functional presentation layer for a reporting application.

When you pepper in things like databases in the cloud, one begins to ponder if every aspect of an application will eventually be distributed, and perhaps the next software evolution will be nothing but middleware that glues stuff together.