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Tableau Public launches visual analysis for the masses

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I’m sorry to tell you serious types out there, but visual analysis is often a game — in fact, one of the best games in town with Tableau Software’s visual analysis tool. Now Tableau Public is going to bring it to the masses.

In the same way that YouTube spawned a surge of new filmmakers, Tableau Public — free, running the same engine as its desktop sibling, and embedable — will bring on a new generation of data players and spectators.

I was a spectator at a data visualization conference one afternoon two years ago. Tableau Software director of visual analysis Jock Mackinlay had finished his presentation and another person had started his.… Read the rest “Tableau Public launches visual analysis for the masses”

Mapping the many faces of “retention”

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Everybody knows what “retention” means until they have to design a metric. Ken Rudin, once of LucidEra and now general manager of analytics at the games site Zynga, thought that he and his team could “put something together” quickly — but it actually took “four solid weeks of discussion and debate.”

About 50 million people play Zynga games every day. It’s the leading online social gaming platform, according to Ken, and it’s grown from zero in 2007 to revenues of “a few” hundred million dollars annual revenue. Every day, the company captures 20 to 30 billion records of data, and Ken and his team use that data to improve revenue, viral marketing — and customer retention.… Read the rest “Mapping the many faces of “retention””

A new game for BI

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BI might be best made into a game. Tableau Software, for example, doesn’t call its tool a game, of course. You don’t sell business software that way. But to many of its users, it might as well be a game. Tableau looks like more fun than any other computer game I know of.

We’ve seen other examples of game-like behavior. Prius owners, for example, compete to see who can get the best gas mileage. And Frank Buytendijk found his game in his running shoe-implanted Nike chip. The chip lets him compete against himself.

The potential for BI occurred to me on the flight home from TDWI Chicago as I watched game researcher Jane McGonigal’s “Saving the World Through Game Design” from last year’s New Yorker Conference.… Read the rest “A new game for BI”