http://bimvp.com/blogs/bsm/archive/2007/01/18/breaking-down-the-performancepoint-server-2007-monitoring-ribbonbar-part-1.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672328917?ie=UTF8&tag=adamnathannet-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0672328917

 Best WPF to get started with - more on this later...

http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mosha/archive/2007/01/28/iif_performance.aspx

http://www.dundas.com/Technologies/WPF/WPFDemo/wpfweb.html

http://gecon.yale.edu/

The G-Econ research project is devoted to developing a geophysically based data set on economic activity for the world. The current data set (GEcon 1.3) is now publicly available and covers "gross cell product" for all regions for 1990, which includes 27,500 terrestrial observations. The basic metric is the regional equivalent of gross domestic product. Gross cell product (GCP) is measured at a 1-degree longitude by 1-degree latitude resolution at a global scale. Updates will be posted as they become available.

(Click here for an animated globe)

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=280804&intsrc=hm_list

“If I can come up with a solution that helps [an employee] understand where his pain is and what he can do about it, that is powerful,” he said. “We try to use that as a marketing tool internally.”
Even with those efforts, Wolters said he still has to prove the benefits of BI to his CIO and even to other IT employees. “We have spent a lot of time evangelizing BI to the IT folks,” he said. “They still are in the mind-set that BI is just reporting.”

BI is decisions - better decisions, more decisions, shared decisions, shared consensus - it's pretty hard to quantify how many decisions a typical business person makes per day, but quantifying that with looking at intelligence before/during a decision is quantifiable.  It seems that BI needs to be used to track success of BI.

I've seen companies (and I recommend where I can) to track every access point of BI source in your company.  Track access to Portals, Reports, connections to BI data bases.  Are these trend lines heading North, South or flat?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=aa0c2623-b432-4a1f-9a3c-9d64df130a61&DisplayLang=en

If you are running Office 2007 you can download a great add-in for Data Mining in Excel 2007. 

"Add-In" really doesn't do justice to the functionality in this great application - it basically unleashes all the datamining power in SQL Analysis Services to basic analysts everywhere.

You can find more information about this over on JamieMac's Blog.

Here's a webcast as well.

http://www.trackingthethreat.com/flash/nav.jsp

Since I do some work in Life Science/Pharma doing visualization and link analysis on affiliation, referral networks and managed care networks I thought this was pretty cool.

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home

By leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd and Tagging in a Social context, visualization becomes more about sharing ideas rapidly rather than navigating huge volumes of information.

Pretty interesting...

http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/SusyHEsOtha6l8U_CORIE2-;jsessionid=8A9DC80E4479B32074A7C17D65D7D1C1

http://www.frameworkx.com/frameworkx/contentblogdetail.aspx?blog=56&id=66

Here's a great posting that allows you understand the strengths of Dual core.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid271543545/bctid422563006

Great video of Jeff Han's multi-touch monitor.

Given what's happening to display costs and the drive to higher resolutions and more data to work with I think this has a fair shake of making it to the public.

I built this tree map as an example for looking at thousands of rows of data in a very visual and simple way.  It basically takes two channels of information, a contribution to the whole (the size and proportion of each box) and the color of the node.

Treemap visualization control can be downloaded from: http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/8f88d498-0bd1-4aa4-9ec7-7c7c0c0eb5d4/Details.aspx

So, in VB.Net, here's how you populate a TreeMap control.

Open_DB()
TreemapControl3.MaxColor = Color.Green
TreemapControl3.MinColor = Color.Red
TreemapControl3.MinColorMetric = -50.0F
TreemapControl3.MaxColorMetric = 50.0F
TreemapControl3.IsZoomable = True
TreemapControl3.PaddingPx = 1
lMin = 100000
lMax = -10000

drpMarket.Items.Clear()
rs = New ADODB.Recordset
rs.ActiveConnection = objDEconn
rs.Open("select market, sum(cq), sum(chg) from scriptshareview where type = 'NEW' group by market")
TreemapControl3.Clear()
TreemapControl3.BeginUpdate()

If rs.EOF <> True Then

Do While rs.EOF <> True

drpMarket.Items.Add(rs.Fields(0).Value) ' Market Name
iValue = rs.Fields(2).Value ' How it contributes to the whole
If iValue < lMin Then
lMin = iValue
End If
If iValue > lMax Then
lMax = iValue
End If
TreemapControl3.Nodes.Add(CStr(rs.Fields(0).Value), rs.Fields(1).Value, iValue)
rs.MoveNext()

Loop

End If

rs.Close()
TreemapControl3.MinColorMetric = lMin
TreemapControl3.MaxColorMetric = lMax
TreemapControl3.EndUpdate()
drpMarket.SelectedIndex = 0
Close_DB()

Working with one of our customers, I tried to take a site that clearly took a lot of work to pull of (in this case, www.cnbc.com) and replicate the work using Reporting Services with no code.

By stripping off the Toolbar (&Toolbar=False in the URL) you can build some great Data driven web parts for Sharepoint (or any other portal, for that matter).

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1099541&SiteID=1

This is a worthwhile question to ask and I think that the progression of this thread has some great points...

specifically...(highlighted)

<from thread>

Coming back to your original question on why there is limited application of data mining in businesses, taking my company ( World's No.1 Engineering firm) as one of the example is because the higher management  have a lack of understanding of such latest technologies. For years these people relied on excel to do their data analysis and never felt the need to go beyond it...untill now. Its only when the upper management realizes the importance of data mining, they will employ people having those skills and hence implement . This is of course a known problem but you will be surprised how many good established companies meet the same sad picture, I feel this definitely contributes to one of the reasons why data mining is not so popular.

</>

I think this is a true statement about lots of things in BI - people look through the prism of how it was done when they were a manager or when they were a programmer - meanwhile, the data get more voluminous and more complex and the time to make decisions becomes smaller and smaller.

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci884512,00.htm

I got a comment today from Alex, the editor at Whatis.com that I've been added to the BI Blogs there.

Check me out on the Favorite technology Blogs section...

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci884512,00.html?offer=ed_award_blogs

Thanks Alex and Whatis.com!

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/webtrends2007

I do a lot of travel to Washington DC, and have grown to love the Metro Subway system.  I ran across this really cool "subway" diagram of the major companies influencing the web in 2007.

Pretty cool, huh?

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/f/?en-us/library/7e6ce086-57b6-4ef2-8117-e725de18f2401033.mspx

http://www.sqlserverdatamining.com/VisioTree/

http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mosha/archive/2006/12/18/aggregate_multiplication.aspx

Mosha Pasumansky has a great post on how to handle Multiplication and Powers using MDX Calculations and Expressions.

"MDX has some built-in aggregation functions - Sum, Count, Min and Max. There is also an ubiquitous Aggregate function, which will aggregate values according to the current measure aggregation function, which also adds Distinct Count and all of the semiadditive measures. But what if we need to compute not the Sum, but rather the Product (Multiplication) of values."

He also covers logarithms.

http://scobleizer.com/2007/01/10/the-iphone-reality-distortion-field/

I'm always amazed at the ability of Steve Jobs to mesmerize the world - he truly is a master of showmanship.  Now that the iPhone announcement is 24 hours old it is interesting to see the reality setting in...

• No Tactile feedback - how many accidents will that cause?
• Battery is 5 hours and not replaceable
• Cingular only and GSM - huge limitation
• Mediocre Camera with no flash and no zoom features
• No GPS - but it shows Google Maps - WHAAAAATTTTTT?????!

I think this phone will sell, but only to the Alpha-MAC-Geek.  It's too expensive and limited for mass consumption.  As always though, Apple has introduced some great, innovative new features that are likely to be adopted and copied by all kinds of cell phone makers - that's good as the sector needed innovation.