Invizua

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) on Data Visualisation & Big Data

James Sandoval — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:47:27 +0000

There are few surprises in this article, but we here at Invizua HQ always like to see stats in favour of #dataviz tools and working practices.

We especially like what Philip Russom, director of data management research at TDWI, had to say, “My own research shows that advanced data visualization is the No. 1 area where users expect to buy more tools, and use more, as a best practice with big-data analytics”.

This passage regarding the visualisation of large data sets was particularly refreshing:

“Organizations looking to visualize big data can overcome such limitations by aggregating data or eliminating unnecessary data points based on the specific requirements of the intended user audience, McDaniel said”.

This is great advice for media and marketing services orgs, many of which are still convinced that they need to stuff hundreds of millions or billions of [e.g. DoubleClick data transfer] data points into an in-memory app for #dataviz. Aggregation is absolutely the order of the day.

Read the entire TechTarget article here: “Analysts: Data visualization tools key to ‘big data’ analytics success” http://bit.ly/sMASc9

Enjoy,
James & Co.

Announcing Visokio’s New Video Tutorials

James Sandoval — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:49:07 +0000

In the event you didn’t receive a copy of our recent mailing in which we announced Visokio’s new video tutorials for Omniscope 2.6 (and a few for 2.7), you can see it here: http://conta.cc/vvu6aQ

A few of the tutorials that we especially like are:
– DataManager Basics
– Facebook
– Mixing unrelated data sets
– R Statistics
– Pivot, Depivot and Transpose

Enjoy,
James & Co

Forrester’s Top 10 BI predictions For 2012

James Sandoval — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:13:29 +0000

Forrester’s Boris Evelson does a great job of articulating a number of key themes that we, here at Invizua HQ, believe will indeed be – or certainly should be – fundamentally realised in 2012.

The predictions that resonate with us especially well are:

1. It’s all about getting things done. Standards, a single version of the truth, and enterprise-grade platforms continue to be important, but individual BI tools with the functionality to get things done trumps standards.

3. More BI will move into the hands of end users. IT will learn not fight it or risk becoming irrelevant. IT will also learn not to fight spreadmart/spreadsheet wars or risk becoming irrelevant. Why? See prediction #1.

and

7. BI-specific DBMSes (in-memory, others) will go mainstream.

Naturally, we see Visokio’s Omniscope very much fulfilling against these and many of the other predictions.

To better understand why, get in touch to schedule a demo of Omniscope, including DataManager, DataExplorer and all of the wonderful features that make it a no-brainer for organisations to enrich team members’ skills, save enormous amounts of time and produce high quality and flexible deliverables.

Read Forrester’s top 10 here: http://bit.ly/tFa2yI

Enjoy,
James & Co

R in Omniscope – An awesome development (demo video)

James Sandoval — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:15:37 +0000

Now under development in Omniscope 2.7 Alpha (http://bit.ly/nUd60j) is the addition of an R operation, which is being received very positively by clients.

Here’s a short demo video, courtesy Visokio: http://bit.ly/tPBJqo

You can read more about R below:
– http://bit.ly/rRWfP8 (Wikipedia)
– http://www.r-project.org (The R Project)

And how it compares to SPSS, SAS and related: http://bit.ly/sdplpc (Wikipedia)

Enjoy,
James & Co

This New York Times article is spot on!

James Sandoval — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:18:43 +0000

See it here:

Ad Companies Face a Widening Talent Gap – http://nyti.ms/soZ4XS

A couple of key passages:
– “The digital talent gap is driven in part by the enormous amount of user data that ad tech companies are collecting for agencies and marketers — data that is instrumental in directing ads to consumers and analyzing trends”

– “Agencies have not traditionally hired for skills like “number crunching, data visualization, quantitative analysis,” Mr. Neumann said. “They’ve never needed those in the past.” Instead, media buyers and even those on the creative side of agencies need to prepare for a new digital reality”

We here at Invizua are excited to help the industry prepare for the continued onslaught of data. Great tools and awesome partners are part of the solution. That’s Invizua.

Enjoy!

James & Co

#DataViz of comScore US Search Engine Rankings (Aug ’11)

James Sandoval — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 15:54:38 +0000

comScore, the digital business analytics organisation, released its numbers for US Search Engine Rankings in August. Here’s the press release: http://bit.ly/pExpSu

We threw the tables of data in comScore’s press release into Omniscope to see what we could present visually.

Here’s what we did in about 15 minutes: http://bit.ly/qaXdfu

There are two tabs in the file – the second unveils some of the DataManager (the visual ETL workspace) work we did to prep the data for visualisation in Omniscope’s DataExplorer (the data visualisation component).

Below are a couple of visuals in the event you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to download the Omniscope .iok file.

Note: You’ll need Java to open the Omniscope file (zero footprint installation) containing the data and #dataviz.

Enjoy,
James & Co

Humanitarian aid in Libya: how much has each country donated?

James Sandoval — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 15:42:33 +0000

Off the back of data supplied by the Guardian Data Blog, we threw together a couple of #dataviz: http://bit.ly/qFl626

Note: You’ll need Java to load the Omniscope viewer

Enjoy,
James & Co

A few views of Invizua’s August 2011 Facebook trial campaign

James Sandoval — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 11:47:03 +0000

We recently ran a short, self-service trial campaign across Facebook. It was an ad hoc effort, so we didn’t really net much in the way of an ROI that’s worth singing about, but it wasn’t a wholly useless exercise either.

To view a handful of our campaign’s stats, click the following link and then select Open when prompted: http://bit.ly/ni8AwW (this will download a zero-footprint installation of Omniscope).

Enjoy,
James & Co

Humanitarian aid in Libya: how much has each country donated?

James Sandoval — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 09:59:30 +0000

The Guardian Datablog recently published a simple set of humanitarian aid numbers that we’ve taken a few minutes to translate into a couple of visuals.

See them via a zero-footprint installation of Omniscope here (select Open when prompted): http://bit.ly/qFl626.

Reach out to us if you’d like to see something similar – or far more advanced – done with your data.

James & Co

Visualising US Facebook Users – July 2008 thru July 2010

James Sandoval — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:15:22 +0000

HERE are a few views that I threw together using Visokio’s Omniscope 2.6 with DataManager. Did ‘em in well under an hour.

US Facebook User Growth

Nearly Every US State Has Seen 2x Growth in FB Users Between July 2009 and July 2010 (Graph View)

California, Texas and New York Together Accounted for Over 30mm FB Users in July 2010 (Tile View)

This last view (below) shows the data transformation work I did in DataManager before I moved the data into Omniscope to craft the visuals above. If you do ANY data integration work, you’ll LOVE the simplicity in DataManager. Any app that’s got a “Data Bar” is something you gotta love.

A View of DataManager - For drag-and-drop data integration before loading into Omniscope for #dataviz

MORE visuals available here in this Microsoft PowerPoint

.pptx https://invizua.box.net/shared/tagkd6y2sc and you can download the data in an Omniscope .iok file (including visuals) here https://invizua.box.net/shared/ba7root9sj.