When I first discovered Swivel.com, I was encouraged that a website was providing a venue for the presenting, discussing, and collaborating around important data, despite its problems. When the folks there responded positively to my recommendations, I was hopeful that the site might evolve into something useful. One of the latest features, which they proudly […]

I discovered today, thanks to the blogger at Serious about Consulting, that Business Objects is working on a new product called BI Desktop. In a recent conversation with the folks at Business Objects Labs, I was encouraged when they said that they are taking data visualization seriously and are working on some new products that […]

Bissantz and Company, one of two German software vendors that makes an Excel add-in for producing sparklines (BonaVista Systems is the other), has added a new feature to their product that you should avoid. In addition to looking at a simple sparkline to see how a series of values has changed through time, you can […]

MicroStrategy recently announced the release of version 8.1, which supposedly features the “state of the art in business dashboards.” Much like most of the other big business intelligence software vendors, however, MicroStrategy seems to think that the essence of data visualization is flash and dazzle. Here’s how they describe it: With advanced visualizations that produce […]