Friday, March 7, 2008

Gooddata Academy Awards

Yesterday, Roman showed me his personal AMEX card management application that allows him to download his creditcard transaction history. I started thinking about personal business intelligence at this very moment. One of our first Gooddata project templates should focus on loading these data and analyzing them upside down. Nice help for people who wants a bit more than just few standard charts that they get from AMEX. This one even beats the website log enrichment and analysis project idea that was my favorite until yesterday.

I bet that there are zillions of similar situations and formats. The question is which one is the best theme for the soon-to-be-released Gooddata tutorial? Do you have some nice idea? Send it my way (zd at gooddata dot com). The Gooddata Academy will evaluate your nomination. The cute, little ipod nano is waiting for the winner.

You should definitely participate! You might hate such contests. However, you certainly don't want me to give yet-another ipod nano, pico, video whatever to Roman for the AMEX idea. ;)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think a great application of this "personal analytics" would be with Fantasy Sports. I've been participating in Fantasy Basketball leagues for over 10 years and am sitting on a mountain of data that begs to be sliced and diced.

Unknown said...

Another idea would be to analyse the detailed monthly telephone bills that you can usually get in CSV / spreadsheet format from your telco provider. Being able to compare different times / rates for dialled numbers, auto-lookup for state / country codes, charts showing most common dialling patterns etc. would help the user to find better-fit plans and cut costs.

I was involved in an Enterprise level version of this 6 years ago, which used macro-wielding contractors and Oracle databases to consolidate multiple european telco services for one Enterprise customer, saving the customer several million USD per year. With an ETL system that is flexible enough, on-demand BI could achieve the same for much less today.

With this new form of BI, integrated social analytics would enable HR, providers and phone users to discuss specific calls or patterns. Since the data is coming from a 3rd party (the telco), analysing it outside the company firewall is not a big problem.

vaclav.dovrtel said...

Let start with personal spending. It is the best data what GoodData could analyze. People don't worry about their security as lot as company.

For example:
https://www.smoneybox.com/ can export data to Excel, CSV, Text, HTML, XML.

Other more USA is:
https://www.wesabe.com/ (CEO Jason Knight)
http://www.mint.com/ (CEO Aaron Patzer)
http://corporate.yodlee.com/