1. Know the web : This may seem an obvious one but it can be broad and complex. “It is necessary to know the web ecosystem, its actors, the way it functions, the SEO, social media, AdWords, etc.. This knowledge can help identify early the correct signals on the website, help website optimization and detecting problems, it is important to know where to look and not get carried away with so called vanity metrics e.g. “time on site” “pages clicked”. Knowing the web and the way the web’s actors operate will develop the skills needed to detect what is really occurring on a site.

How SaaS BI can help… As well as connecting to web analytics data, BIME can connect to a range of sources both online and on-premises including AdWords, Facebook, Salesforce among others. This allows web analysts to understand web data within the larger web ecosystem and within the sales pipeline.

2. Be Cautious : “Beware of jumping to hasty conclusions. Always ensure that the indicators are reliable and the method of tracking is correct”- web analysts can’t do anything constructive with inaccurate data so always check that the data coming in, is what it is supposed to be.

How SaaS BI can help… As with all analytics, nobody can work miracles with bad data but SaaS BI can help monitor web activity helping to recognise anomalous results. Calculations can also be made on the fly to double check the validity of data. A BI tool is useless with invalid data being inputted thus checks of the source data are also a must.

3. Have the ability to synthesize information : It is easy to get bombarded with data. A good web analyst will focus on the essential information first and use the data to quickly and efficiently obtain the information they are looking for. They have the ability to firstly sort and then present the data in such a way to make the data easy to digest for themselves and other interlocutors.

How SaaS BI can help… Dashboards can be built to provide an overview for both a quick snapshot of your web activity and help web analysts sort, synthesize and present the data.

4. A good listener : I recently read an article stating “To guarantee success, spend 95% of your time defining the problem and 5% of the time solving it” and this holds true with most web analytics. A good web analyst will listen : to internal or external clients, to understand the objectives, and to help both define and impact on strategy.

How SaaS BI can help… Visualizations can then be further investigated by dashboard viewers with drill down and drill through capabilities to dive into the base numbers and change metrics slightly to suit specific dashboard viewers. As strategy changes, dashboards are quick and easy to update and with the SaaS pricing model can be scaled up and down when needs and objectives change.

5. The ability to speak the lingo but also do without : Like most professions, web analytics has a myriad of different technical terms. This final skill is to firstly learn exactly what these terms mean but then be able to popularize them to relay them back to non-technical users.

How SaaS BI can help… With no infrastructure and no maintenance you can be set up with powerful business intelligence delivered over the internet in a matter of minutes. A simple drag-and-drop interface and not a line of code necessary mean technical IT skills are no longer a prerequisite for a web analyst. With BIME you can analyze your web data and interrogate it alongside your other sources, visualizing the results in dashboards which can then be shared easily via a unique URL. A successful web analyst gathers, synthesizes and then presents the web data in a way that is useful for themselves and their team.

Once you have set your business objectives SaaS BI can help a web analyst discover if these objectives are being met, and where it is possible to improve. A web analyst takes data and turns it into information, and SaaS BI helps anyone become a web analyst and get the insight into web analytics.

Try it out now with our 10 day free trial!

As the data reveals, The Beatles unsurprisingly lead the way with 7 different ‘million-selling singles’. Other musical luminaries, Boney M and Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta also make up a varied mix of artists who have had more than one ‘million-selling single’.

1997 appears to be a great year for music with 9 ‘million-selling singles’ released that year including “Something About The Way You Look Tonight/Candle In The Wind” – by far the highest selling single in Britain with 4.7m sales.

Parlophone are the record company with both the most overall sales (11.9m) and the most ‘million-selling singles’ (10) on the list.

Other singles on the list include…
2 – Kids TV shows turned popstars : Teletubbies, Bob The Builder
4 – Christmas singles : Do They Know It’s Christmas? – Band Aid & re-recorded by Band Aid 20, Last Christmas – Wham!, Merry Xmas Everybody – Slade, White Christmas – Bing Crosby with the Ken Darby Singers and John Scott Trotter Orchestra
6 – Reality Show Winners – Will Young, Gareth Gates, Shayne Ward, Hear’Say, Leona Lewis, Matt Cardle

Using the BIME calculation engine we were able to discover the most common words amongst the song titles and thus the secret formula to creating a ‘million-selling single’… so look out for the new single by BIME – “Rock ‘n’ Roll Baby Lion Heart Girl I believe / feel you never loved me” due out sometime in 2013.

View the full dashboard HERE.

The challenges of BigData are no longer solely the domain of large companies. Companies of all sizes must today deal with floods of data from multiple modern data sources.How to respond to these new challenges without spending huge sums of money?

New combinations of cloud technology exist which respond quickly to the needs of the business users, even in the context of BigData.

A proof of concept in just a few days, subscription and consumption on demand, all your data online and accessible on-premise in the same place for incredible online collaboration. These new “combos”, simple to use but sophisticated capabilities are everything you can expect from modern Business Intelligence.Fast, sexy, mobile, user-centred: the interface with a powerful calculation engine with these solutions, analytics in the cloud is more than promising, it’s a reality.

A live demo of cloud BI cutting BigData down to size by:

Christophe Baroux from Google BigQuery
Olivier Chanoux from gPartner
Rachel Delacour from BIME

Informations:
Date: Mardi 20 Novembre 2012
Horaire: 10h00
Lieu: Connexion en ligne

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Best Cloud BI/Analytics Solution
Best Big Data Solution

Merci à tous!

In this month’s newsletter:

Read it here!

1. Ti An Marketing
Ti An marketing is a CRM and e-CRM consulting agency, assisting clients in implementing their CRM and digital solutions. Their pragmatic approach allows them to provide solutions for a variety of clients ; from simple problems to the most complex, for companies wishing to optimize their marketing and put in place the mechanics of a marketing operation to communicate to all their clients or prospects.

2. The challenge
When putting in place reporting tools for marketing and sales activities, it can be time consuming to create and maintain databases with a backlog of information. It is also challenging to maintain relevant control and measurement of marketing and business operations, which often requires the standardization of the data and this is far from simple. They also needed to be able to share the results and to filter the information available based on various profiles (general management, marketing, sales) which demanded a range of different permissions and formatting.

“BIME allowed us to focus the key question : What are the indicators we want to implement ? And allowed us to forget about the very technical aspects of analyzing these indicators. BIME provides a dichotomous and scalable solution to display the results as actually expected.”

“With BIME, viewing all the transactions from the various sites and mixing this information with marketing and sales results has become a breeze. This information can then be sent out to the team, clients and published using a unique URL, making it very simple.
BIME allows us to do all this without calling upon an “army of developers” and allow business (as oppose to IT) staff to drive our analytics.”

“Simple, powerful, interactive and collaborative ; BIME allowed us to implement in ‘record time’ (just 1-2 days), a solution for measuring performance”

Goulven Aubrée, CEO

3. Who and how?
“Thanks to its intuitive user interface, BIME allows even the least technical users to get up and running quickly. The cloud allows us to access the solution from anywhere with just an internet connection. Previously the marketing or sales department would have to go through the IT department, and therefore it became a lengthy process, today the analysis can be executed directly without intermediaries.”

4. Impact
“Simple, powerful, interactive and collaborative ; BIME allowed us to implement in ‘record time’, (just 1-2 days) a solution for measuring performance and thus it provides the flexibility necessary to put in place a variety of dashboards. Developing and implementing reporting solutions on top of databases usually requires a lot of time and therefore money. For such a reporting solution we budgeted 10k-40k € but with the development of BIME we can achieve the same thing at a cost 5 to 20 times lower.”

A big thank you to Goulven and Ti An Marketing for this testimonial !

Sample Dashboard
Here is a sample dashboard incorporating a few key indicators followed by Ti An Marketing and offered to its customers (Dummy Data). The dashboard viewer has the ability to filter and examine different scenarios for the different campaigns.

https://news.bimeapp.com/players/dashboard/tianmarketing
Login : public
Pass : cloud

What’s the one thing besides James Bond himself that the franchise has in common in each of the so far 23 movies? People get killed – lots and lots of them.

Since 1962, when Dr. No premiered, a total of 1,299 people have been killed. And plenty more are surely going to perish in the 23rd movie in the series entitled “Skyfall.”

Is there a relationship between the number of people killed in each movie by Agent 007 vs. by other characters, and how much each movie cost and brought in at the box office?

The modern Bond does less dirty work in terms of pure body count but overall deaths are also falling. The “Attitude Change” and “Ruthlessness Index” show that trend. In “Dr. No” 12 people are killed in total and 33.33% of them by James Bond (Sean Connery). In “You Only Live Twice” 196 people are killed in total and 10.71% by James Bond (Sean Connery). Then in “Golden Eye” 72 people are killed and 65.28% by James Bond (Pierce Brosnan). In the last Bond movie released to date, “Quantum of Solace,” a modest 31 people are killed, but 51.61% die at the hands of 007 (Daniel Craig).

Bond villain Oddjob in Goldfinger (1964)

While there has been a drop-off in overall fatalities (fewer mass killings by Goldfinger, Oddjob, Jaws and the rest of the bad guys) the focus has shifted to Bond, whose victims (who are the bad guys) are increasing in proportion terms. This “Attitude Change” perhaps suggests that the cinema audience is more accepting of a body-count caused by the righteous hero, than the killing of large numbers of innocent bystanders.

Looking at the budget of each movie from the start, 50 years ago, we can see that the ROI has gone down precipitously, from almost 60x to a meager 2.6x. It may not be as good a business to be bloody as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, but the sharp increase in budget (particularly in the most recent film “Quantam of Solace”) partly explains the diminishing ROI.

The more ruthless modern Bond still draws hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. We’ll be first in line to see if Daniel Craig continues his ruthless streak in the latest Bond movie when it is released later this week.

Each and every piece of the BIME UI has been optimized for clarity and usability. This effort affects almost every screen but some have been rebuilt from the ground up. For instance, we’ve rethought the way people create connections, to make this a much more streamlined experience and easier to update. Now you can create a data warehouse in the cloud, going from scratch to live in only four minutes.

The easiest way to import data in Google BigQuery
We have expanded our suite of data storage options with the addition of Google BigQuery. The result is that now you can use Déjà Vu for caching small datasets, BimeDB for bigger datasets and full relational needs, and finally BigQuery for really Big Data. Dealing with data import in BigQuery through ETL or the REST API can be cumbersome at first so we are very happy to make it a one click process.

BIME OEM API
The first version of the BIME API is out. It has a narrow focus: to allow 3rd party integration and OEM. Any service can now add a true Business intelligence module to its offering.

The documentation is here: https://github.com/nicolas/bime-api and we built a sample RAILS application here: https://github.com/nicolas/bime-api-demo

NOT SO MINOR Features in V4.5
Big Data plan
• Introducing the Big Data plan for Big Query and SAP HANA connections (more to come)

Data sources and datawarehouse-as-a-service
• BigQuery custom SQL in the connection definition
• Postgre Heroku support
• SQL Server improvements with better type detection
• SQL Azure support
• SAP Hana improvements
• A much improved query blender user interface and SQL designer
• Numerous fixes on the Facebook insight API connector
• Import to BimeDB works for any alphabets

Data Visualization
• Ability to change the font size in the datagrid
• Row selector positioning by index, value, always last, always first
• Tons of improvements on heatmaps
• Can generate missing elements for Time Axes, eg to ‘fill in’ periods without results.
• Can display the sum of the pie chart at the center
• Viewers can change visualizations from the dashboard
• Multi line header in the grid visualization
• Color of KPI visualization follows text color
• Increase page size for BigQuery and RDBMS to 25 000 rows

Information sharing
• PDF export compatibility with japanese characters
• Decompose path has an option “None” to prevent decomposition on specified charts in your dashboards
• Can style comments

Administration
• List unused queries in the library
• Bime Desktop is signed for Mac OS’s gatekeeper
• “Update all” in scheduler to quickly update all your models at once

Contact us for an online demo and try it out for yourself with our 10 day free trial.

“We selected BIME to be the best cloud Business Intelligence solution of Fall 2012 due to the fact that once you start building your reports with BIME, you turn your company into beautiful gallery of insight and analytics.”

Read the full review on the Start2Cloud website.