BI shouldn’t look like BI on smart phones

By:  Kathleen Lau On: 03 Mar 2010 For: ComputerWorld Canada 

During the Toronto stop of a Canadian road show to unveil release 2 of business intelligence tool MicroStrategy version 9, one exec explained why classic BI is no good for smart phones. Customers Hudson’s Bay and St. Elizabeth Healthcare share experiences with the software.

“Most applications that project to mobile phones are nothing more than business intelligence pre-packaged,” said Mark LaRow, senior vice-president of products with the McLean, Virginia-based BI software vendor.

Classic BI reports like grids and graph reports don’t work for the smart phone’s form factor and, if anything, said LaRow, such reports shouldn’t look like BI when viewed on a smart phone.continue reading

Push vs. Pull: Trends in Retail Shopping

Something I read in this month’s issue of Fast Company resonated with me:
"When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond." (Full article: Magic Shop by Alex Frankel)

Once a consumer enters the door of a brick and mortar store or navigates to a webpage, they don’t want to be sold to. At that point in the buying process, buyers are looking for one of 2 things: more information or a quick and easy way to execute their purchase.
I shop most often at stores that let me peruse indefinitely, undisturbed… but who also have knowledgeable people available for those times when I have a question. Like IKEA, Barnes & Noble, LL Bean, and most online stores.

<<>>see on the same shelf: Pull and Push Communications: Ranganathan's Laws re-interpreted

Digital pens more trouble than they're worth

Oct 29, 2007 Robert Cribb Toronto Star
No matter how modern technology advances, our most ancient devices seem to remain with us.

And when it comes to the written word, that's a good thing.
Computerized writing devices that double as mini computers are an attempt to merge the primitive with the contemporary. continue reading

See also: Future Technology- Are digital pens something to write home about? "Saying that, it is hard to imagine how the convenience and portability of the pen could be bettered. Stuff a pen and notebook in your pocket and you can write a novel in a cafe or in the middle of a desert. The same is true of digital pens -- although you would need to carry a mobile phone to transmit the data to a storage device for processing later. In the future, though, it might be possible to store gigabytes' worth of text and image data in the pen itself. A development like that could see the (not so humble) pen living on for a further 5,000 years...