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So I am standing at Heathrow Airport arrivals waiting for my ride and there is a man a few yards in front of me wearing a pair of large bull horns on his head. The British are renowned for being a little eccentric but this is something I have never seen before. Of course, he could have been wearing the horns so he would be easily recognized by whoever he was meeting off the plane. He was certainly easy to spot and visually stood out like nobody else there.
The next day I was at a customer site where a colleague was presenting on mobile BI dashboards. The dashboards had been created in HTML5 using InfoBurst Apps and incorporating Google maps for location intelligence. The linkage between the map and the business intelligence data housed in the InfoBurst cache for speed, performance and quantity of data accessed was impressive and visually compelling. The usage of native integration with other iPad applications for annotation and email caused a lot of excitement as did the ability of InfoBurst Apps to allow write back from the mobile dashboard to any database. However, it was the animation and dynamic movement of visuals on the iPad that really blew their socks off.
This animation involved shuffling visuals on the iPad based on different sort and filter options. It is not the sort of thing you see in most dashboards and visually stood out more than anything else. Yes, they were also excited by drilling down from a point on a map straight to a street picture view but they had seen that before in other applications whereas the shuffle was unique.
Maybe it appealed to that British sense of the unusual and eccentric or maybe, like the man with the bull horns, it visually stood out like nothing else they had seen before. All I know is that after they saw the dashboard shuffle, they were super excited and bullish to start creating some mobile dashboards of their own.
