Fun
Siri meets Business Intelligence
As you may know, Apple’s latest iPhone, the 4S, has a virtual assistent in it called Siri. You can ask Siri questions or tell it do something for you, just by using your voice. For example “What will the weather be tomorrow?” or “What is my next meeting about?”. This is very cool stuff!
So, as we have seen this big move towards mobile business intelligence over the last two years with tools like RoamBI, MicroStrategy (and now even SAP has awoken), how cool would it be to go one step further and let Business Intelligence meet Siri?! Think of commands like “Who is my top sales guy in Germany for 2011?”, “Call this person now!”, or something like “Siri, give me the total sales for customer BMW”.
Dutch SAP BI colleague Ronald Konijnenburg checked the possibilities to make this work and came across an interesting tool called Siri Proxy:
Siri Proxy is a proxy server for Apple’s Siri “assistant”. The idea is to allow for the creation of custom handlers for different actions. This can allow developers to easily add functionality to Siri.
After installing Siri Proxy on a Ubuntu (Linux) machine and checking some existing plugins from the Siri Proxy community he took up the challenge to write his own plugin. This plugin should be able to execute SQL statements and query any database (in-memory or not). With some technical help on the Ruby programming (Ruby is the language Siri Proxy is written in) a working plugin was created in a very short time period.
As a proof of concept a MySQL database was installed on the Ubuntu environment, with a simple table containing the key figures Sales and the objects Sales rep, Customer and Date, loaded with some random data. Now, by asking Siri a question like “Give me total sales for customer Google”, the spoken words are translated into a SQL statement that looks something like SELECT * FROM Sales.Sales WHERE Customer = ‘Google’. After executing this SQL statement on the table the sales amount will be returned. Siri now can nicely tell you the answer.
Check the video below to see a demonstration of Sire meeting Business Intelligence. The second video (click the more… button below) gives a bit more background info.
Again, great job Ronald! So what’s next? Siri talking to SAP HANA?
Posted in: Fun, New technologyLOLvid: Fun with SAP BusinessObjects naming conventions
Hahaha check this video on the recent SAP BusinessObjects name changes.
I lol’d.
Posted in: Fun, SAP BusinessObjects
5 reasons I like Spotify
I recently discovered this online music service called Spotify and after a try-out of a few weeks I just have to let you know how great this concept is. Spotify is a cloud based music service, which means that you don’t have to download a song before you can listen to it anymore. It just streams the music on demand. Spotify is available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands (sorry USA and Canada). Try it!
1. Big music catalogue
Spotify contains over 8 millions musc tracks including artists from the big labels like Universal, EMI, Sony etc. Of course the traditional ‘difficult’ bands don’t show up (Metallica). The Spotify software has an option to import music files, so you can still listen to these non-available bands with Spotify if you get their music from other sources. Also, I found a lot of local bands (Jacqueline, Acda & de Munnik, Lars Winnerbäck).
