Tag: Pivot Viewer

Categories
Business Intelligence

App Store Pivot Viewer – ZoomAppy

Good ideas are hard to stop from happening. After dorking around with Pivot Viewer, I was thinking of things I could “pivot”, and the iTunes App Store was one of them. No real API though, there are some out there that have created APIs, or you could scrape the web, etc but nothing solid.

Looks like someone took that idea and ran with it, called ZoomAppy (http://zoomappy.com/). RIght now it looks like it is just the app store, but they have more in store.

I agree that Pivot Viewer is “Business Intelligence”, but it is a different way of thinking. Where in traditional BI, you think of looking at metric/measures like sales/inventory, etc. With PivotViewer, you are looking at “objects” and filtering them based on properties. Teams, Bikes, Apps, Cars, People. Also PivotViewer doesn’t give you any type of aggregations besides counts, so it is limited in that regard.

What else would be a good candidate for Pivot Viewer?


Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming

OData is the New Hotness

Not sure why I didn’t look into this sooner. OData. Open Data Protocol.

Not many providers, but this has huge potential. First off, PowerPivot can consume OData feeds! See the “From Data Feeds” button 🙂

I used it to download Netflix’s whole library. I tried to download StackOverflow’s data (http://odata.stackexchange.com/) but had no luck. Either got errors or it was taking forEVER!

But, you can see how easy it is to create an OData API for your data? Scott Hanselman did it for StackOverlfow in 30 minutes. This opens up HUGE oppourtunities for apps and ISV’s to expose their data out for end user and other developer consumption.

You can see all the “producers” here: http://www.odata.org/producers .. I am sure there are more, just not on the list.

What a cool easy way to expose your data as an “API” out there.. Excited to see how it is used (Pivot Viewer, Power Pivot, etc) and what people do with it.

Categories
Business Intelligence Geeky/Programming Reviews

Microsoft Live Labs Pivot Viewer – Rich Internet Application

So, I previously blogged about using PivotViewer in your Web Applications, but you can also just consume Pivot collections using the “Pivot” tool from Microsoft Live Labs

You can download it here

What does this tool offer? Well first it has a library/homepage of collections you can browse

You can do some slicing and dicing on a collection of Presidents, or athletes, or Sports Illustrated covers. This tool and technology really fasinates me. It is “Business Intelligence” but in a different way – it is based on “objects” (images) instead of “metrics”. I like it.

What are some cool things I think this could be used for? Company Directory? Online Catalog? Beer selection at Eddie’s? the list goes on and on..

Additionally there is now an add in for SQL Server Reporting Services and SharePoint 2010 you can download here

Once I have an environment in which I can test that set up, I will blog about it.