iPhone
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 technology5 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).
Twitter, Flash & HTML5
Twitter is great. It keeps me up-to-date on what is happening in the world and nowadays I get my information directly from the source! The added value of those traditional, old-school newspaper/TV journalists is decreasing day by day. This is a good thing. I see most journalists as nothing more than a filter, tweaking their opinions into the real facts. With Twitter the people that I see as important or interesting are the modern journalists. They are my personal groups of journalists. And if they don’t deliver quality, I just unfollow them.
Tonight I read two nice tweets. First I learned that someone wrote an app/hack to use flash on the iPhone/iPad (iOS). If this thing really works this would be great news for dashboard development with Xcelsius SAP Crystal Dashboard Design Personal Edition. Finally the development of dashboards for the iPhone and iPad could begin. Let’s hope so. Here is the article with the video ‘proof’.
Next I read a tweet about the differences between Adobe Flash and HTML5. Apple favours HTML5 and gives a nice showcase on its website (Safari 5 required). But what exactly is HTML5 and how can Flash and HTML5 be compared? Focus published this cool A4-sized overview.
Thanks for tweeting!
Posted in: Knowledge sharing, New technology, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, Twitter, XcelsiusI want iSlate [updated]
![I want iSlate [updated]](https://www.hackingsap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/apple-tablet.jpg "I want iSlate [updated]")
As you may have read Apple is expected to make a major product announcement by the end of this month. Will the iTablet/iSlate/iGuide finally come? Many rumor/news sites think so and I sure hope it is true. Gizmodo made a nice overview on the Apple tablet rumors so you don’t have to read all those rumor sites yourself. For me this feels like the months before the iPhone release in 2007 all over again.
The #1 reason for me to buy such a device – besides the fact that I obviously like new Apple stuff – would be that I am ditching paper in 2010. At the end of 2009 I purchased and read lots of paper books which made me think. Why am I still driving to my local bookstore to get my books, and why am I still waiting days/weeks for my Amazon/Bol.com orders to be delivered when I know that most books are available in digital format. Every week I receive several paper magazines and until last week I even got a daily newspaper on my doormat! Also, at work my desk is always filled with prints of documents because I don’t like to read long texts from a computer screen and I want to write some small notes on them.
So I started looking for a digital paper/e-reader like device that would allow me to really go digital. Fast conclusion was that they all kinda suck. Yes even the Amazon Kindle DX. I don’t want to use an USB cable to sync it to my Mac. I want a real browser. I want a multitouch screen. I want a color screen. I want to edit docs. I want to use spreadsheets. I want to watch videos. I want to install small Apps.
So actually I just want a big iPhone with a screen that is easy on the eyes. When can I get it, Apple?
Update: 24 hours after writing this blog I got the Plastic Logic News Alert in my mailbox. I think over a year ago I read something on the web about a cool e-ink/e-paper prototype, which was of a much higher quality than the available e-readers. It must have grabbed my attention because I signed up for the newsletter, which learns me that they finally unveiled the specs, prizing and release date for their QUE product. After a quick look at the website I think this comes pretty close to what I am looking for. Its business oriented, supports MS Excel, has a multitouch screen, enables commenting, is Mac compatible and it sure looks great. Major remarks are the high price ($649 – $799) and the no-color screen. QUE will be available in April 2010. The video below gives an impression of the device.
Posted in: New technology
