For those of you who regularly visit my blog, I apologize for the lack of posts this month. After returning from holiday I have been heads down working on many exciting things ranging from innovative new demos to new products and releases. I will be back in September with tons of new material to share. Here are some things for you to look forward to in September:

• New dashboard examples leveraging new integrations and techniques.
• New CSV connector from Centigon Solutions: It is almost ready for prime-time!
• My full review and breakdown of Antivia's Xcelsius Web Intelligence Integration Suite which is absolutely brilliant.
• A dashboard design for the community to critique. I have been asked countless times to provide examples of properly designed dashboards with Xcelsius so I finally took the time to clean one up.

If you are thinking about building components for Xcelsius, I recommend that you check out this webinar presented by Evan DeLodder: Custom Components & the Xcelsius SDK: Facts, Myths and Tremendous Potential. Below is the synopsis:

Xcelsius has become a powerful platform for creating powerful business intelligence dashboards. The availability of the Xcelsius SDK provides an opportunitiy for organizations to integrate new visualization, logic and connectivity.

Join us for a webinar sponsored by Global BusinessObjects Network and learn from one of the premier experts in Flex/Xcelsius integration. Evan DeLodder, Sr flex developer and Xcelsius expert, will guide you through the facts, myths and potential for you to create Xcelsius add on components that will imrpove your organization's ability to navigate and consume information quickly.

August 27, 2009 - 12 p.m.
Evan DeLodder, Centigon Solutions

Sign Up Here

Last week, I was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, For Business Owners, iPhone Apps Abound, about my experience using RoamBi for the iPhone. In short, I lived out an experience that every business owner has dreamed of... Conducting business while sitting on a remote beach without a computer.

Last month I went to the Bahamas to relax and re-energize in preparation for the second half of the year. This was my first vacation equipped with an iPhone and RoamBi, which ended up helping me finalize an opportunity for Centigon Solutions. This led to the following quote in the wallstreet journal:

"...RoamBi Visualizer, a free app from MeLLmo Inc., turns data in Excel spreadsheets (as well as Salesforce.com, SAP and others) into slick interactive graphics that make analyzing business opportunities and sales trends easy.

Ryan Goodman, founder of Centigon Solutions Inc., a small San Diego software firm, earlier this month fired up RoamBi to view product, licensing and pricing data to help the company's sales director close a deal, all while sitting on a Bahamas beach. "I returned from vacation without opening my laptop once," Mr. Goodman says..."

Laptops and mobile phones have existed for my entire professional career, so I don't understand the concept of being disconnected. By practicing what I preach on my blog, I use the same tools to run my business. While I was on vacation, I used my mobile device enabled with RoamBi to keep tabs on what was going on without immersing myself in work. At the end of the day, technologies like RoamBi are going to help us react and seek opportunities without being tethered to a computer. For those of us who take advantage, mobile technologies will facilitate a better balance between our professional and personal lives because the "workplace" can be anywhere!

In the last five years, advancements in mobile device hardware and software have provided a new medium for presenting information. With iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Palm enabled devices competing to attract both consumer and business user adoption, there are tremendous opportunities to improve the way businesses monitor and consume information while un-tethered from a computer...

Read Entire Article at DashboardInsight.com

Learn more about mobile applications at http://mobiledatavisualization.com

Google recently announced the availability of their Google Analytics Beta to the general public. The value of this information in a BI dashboard is the ability to mash this data up with other marketing and sales information behind your organization’s firewall. I think that if leveraged correctly, the data from Google Analytics can assist an organization to gain more visibility to how a web presence and/or a web channel affects the businesses’ marketing costs and web generated sales. In addition, this information in a dashboard setting could also provide more visibility above and beyond power marketers and web administrators.

We know that this information would be valuable if exposed for easy consumption within Xcelsius so I am wondering how many of you out there are using Xcelsius to monitor marketing activity? Furthermore, do you think this information is critical to your dashboard strategy?