Tableau…

A product manager pointed out this product when I was showing her our new MS Analytics (olap) implementation a couple weeks ago.

They have some great examples on their site of just how powerful this product is.  http://www.tableausoftware.com/learning/examples

It is spendy, $1500 per named license + maintenance.

It’s primarily designed to go against Excel or table data, but it works with olap cubes as well, or at least somewhat.  Just enough to get you excited then you find out there’s a number of things you can’t do.  Hopefully this will be enhanced in a future version.

It works outstandingly well if your data is nice and pretty.  Normalized well.  Of course all of the sample data falls into that category.   It also works well against SQL, gain if your joins are easy to do.  It would be nice if they had a visual tool for creating joins.

Even so, I highly recommend it.

I forget stuff.  So I go to great pains to take notes.  I use a multitude of technologies, including rude text files with reminders, to two wiki’s one personal and one for my department at work.

I’ve tried OneNote, and other fancy stuff, but the wiki’s by far work the best at least so far.

The last 24 hours have revealed two pretty cool technologies or apps I’d like to share with you.

First off Jott. 

It’s not new, just new to me and it works pretty well.

It’s beta as all Web 2.0 technologies are. You simply register your phone and create an account.   Based on caller ID it recognizes you.  You record a Jott, and it transcribes your voice to text and dispatches it.

It can send SMS, an email, post to a blog, do all kinds of good stuff.   Pretty slick and free.

So far I haven’t been able to get it to post to WordPress but it’s supposed to be able to do that.

The second part which is growing on me the more I play with it is:

Evernote

Another Web 2.0 product also in beta.  Though private beta at this time.  I have invites if you’re interested.  email me at datapoohbah (at) gmail (dot) com, or post a comment.

Evernote is similar to Microsoft OneNote.  Better in some areas, weaker in others.  It’s cross platform and has a great web interface.  With both Windows and Mac Clients that synchronize your notes so they are almost always available.  It has pretty slick search and tagging.  Doesn’t do attachments worth a crap, but this could potentially replace my Wiki’s…

Maybe not.  But I can have my Jotts’s create Evernotes, and that’s pretty cool.

If there is other cool stuff like this out there that you think I should look at, review or bash, please post a comment.

-DP

Initially it was reported that it drained through the bottom, but this appears to be where you store your filtered beer.

I’m not sure I’d want to do that, it looks kinda sharp to me…