Media Dojo

All too often, the term “media” is larded with the specific baggage of the entertainment industry. I take a more expansionist view of media, along the lines of Marshall McLuhan, one of my intellectual heros.

To me, media is an extension of our nervous system, both in how we think and, more importantly, how we act. Media can entertain, sure. But it also needs to inform. It’s not typical to think of WORD, PDF, or XLS as media. But these file types face similar challenges as other media types in the quest to capture a user’s attention and mental investment to help them achieve a goal.

For a long time, however, the need for enterprise information to connect to the user through design of a decent user interface took second place. Users forced themselves to forget all those hellish rows, columns, macros and other stuff to get to the information underneath.

Nowhere has the importance of information and the impotence of decent UI design been most pronounced than in mobile information. Shrink wrapping poor desktop interfaces to create perfectly horrible mobile interfaces was a time honored tradition until Apple put a match to tons of dry pent-up demand with iPhone.

Now, cloud computing is promising to take mobile information to the next stage. One of the pleasant surprises in doing the research for GigaOm on mobile cloud computing was that it surfaced enterprise media applications that are pushing the envelope as hard as entertainment oriented apps. Through that project, I met Roambi (roaming business intelligence) out of Del Mar, CA. Media Dojo Tear Sheet–Roambi

Romabi is a cloud-based mobile media play for enterprises. I call it a media play because it transforms numeric data into unique visualizations that are specifically designed to be viewed on an iPhone.

I spoke with Roambi CEO Santiago Becerra and his team about data visualization as an application and aesthetic for smartphones, specifically iPhone.

Media Dojo: Please define Data Visualization..

Santiago Becerra: Data visualization tools and applications enhance the user’s comprehension and absorption of information that is presented to them. The goal is to help users consume data in a much more insightful way to where they can derive the meaning of the data more easily.

MD: You and your team started in the business intelligence and data visualization worlds before launching Roambi. What drew you to mobile devices?

SB: We got ahold of the iPhone when it first came out and were quickly impressed that we weren’t holding a phone in our hands but a handheld computer. We were so inspired by the graphical capabilities and power of the phone that we thought it was the perfect platform for data visualization. What we found in our research is that the mobile market was very successful at connecting people to people but not so successful at connecting people to their data, especially their numerical data.

That’s where we saw a need for and a benefit from data visualization tailored to a small screen device. Typically, when data intensive enterprise tools move to a small screen device, they tend to be desktop solutions that have been mashed down to fit into a smaller package. That leaves the user experience completely unusable and unreadable as you try to navigate around. That’s where we saw a need for and a benefit from data visualization tailored to a small screen device.

MD: What about customers? Who is trying this out?

SB: Although our background is business intelligence, our target market is data visualization, which is much larger. It’s about being able to consume any type of numeric data that’s flowing around the organization. Around 80-90 percent of the “stuff” you find in a firm is operational information that flows in PDF, XLS or even in print outs. The mindset is for people on the go who need to access this information much faster, sometimes in more physically challenging circumstances. We’re getting a lot of traction from pharmas with large sales forces who are typically out of the office. They come in and out of offices many times each day.

MD: How does it work in practice?

SB: We have a web publisher that ingests the numeric data, re-formats and interprets it for optimal viewing on the iPhone. The web publisher sits on a server that’s either installed in-house or accessed by the customer as part of a SaaS offer. The user needs to download a free client onto the iPhone for display and storage. We make revenue either through the software licence or the SaaS subscription.

MD: How does Romabi employ cloud computing?

SB: What brought us to the cloud was the tremendous uncertainty about how big and how fast the business in this space would grow. There were no comparable services to gauge our capacity needs. Basically, we were looking for a way to scale quickly. The most flexible option was the cloud. That allows a small company like ours to gain tremendous capacity from day one. Aside from the local code that runs on the iPhone, all the rest is in the cloud. In house we only have our source code for developers. All the production is cloud-based.

MD: Last question. I know you work with Saleforce.com with data visualizations. Are there appreciable differences working with a partner who’s already in the cloud versus one who is not?

SB: Historically, we tapped on other vendors APIs such as SAP and went through the same process or inheriting their security model and working from there. However, some things are easier in the cloud. For example, with SalesForce we can access a set of pre-canned templates that are instantly available to any mobile SF user without having to go through our web publisher app. So if a SF user with an iPhone downloads our app and goes to the SF portal, he will see standard SF reports instantly available to download without going through the publisher to convert it. On-premise it’s not as easy. We’ve got to have IT help us with the on-premise data.

Another equally important aspect is the ease with keeping the data up to date via a cloud-based partner. SalesForce is always live and always changing. Rather than uploading and reformatting a XLS file each time it changes, the SF visualization changes with changes in the data.

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