E-learning Curve Blog at Edublogs

Learning professionals need to interrogate and understand data. Whether you’re interpreting the LMS access logs of your courseware, checking out your blog and wiki usage, quantifying Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels, or devising statistical instruments and analyzing data for your latest white paper, you need to look at and manipulate long columns and rows of information. (What do you mean you don’t do any of that stuff? Are you in the right job?)

iPhone users now have another way to access and view their spreadsheets and charts: software development house MeLLmo have released RoamBi, an app that lets you view the static data from spreadsheets and tables as interactive charts that can be published on an iPhone or iPod touch. The free-to-use RoamBi Visualizer app is available for download from the  iTunes App Store.

The RoamBi app displays data on your iPhone, giving you access to your stats and figures from your free-to-use online RoamBi account. The app works well with CVS- and Microsoft Excel-formatted data, and can manage Salesforce.com account reports, business process outsourcing (BPO) key performance indicators. Users of the enterprise version of RoamBi can also import SAP Crystal Reports and SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence data into the app.

According to MeLLmo’s Santiago Becerra,

It’s the first real enterprise-grade app that allows users to transfer all the info they use on a day-to-day basis onto the iPhone.

Your spreadsheet, BPO and KPI data is stored on the app’s accompanying Web site. Developed in Adobe Flex (the open source Flash-based framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications), you upload your content to RoamBi Designer, where you can customize views for delivery to the iPhone. The finished views are published from the Web tool to your phone through an Amazon-hosted server. MeLLmo state that the resultant outputs are

like a mini-app that allows you to navigate through a particular set of data in a way that feels very natural to you.

RoamBi has a number of views including

• CataList – organizes data into different hierarchical levels, interpreting those levels based on the metadata from the spreadsheet.
• Cardex – a 3-D rolodex-style view of records
• Pie View – presents data a spinnable pie chart
• SuperList – displays data in a tabular format with fixed column and row titles.

I recently commented on the growing acceptance of the iPhone as an enterprise-level communications solution. I would assert that we are now beginning to see the emergence of a virtuous circle: now that the popular demand is there, software houses will invest in developing productivity apps like RoamBi, which will in turn drive more business users to the device, which will result in more business functionality being ported to the device. I hope this will lead to an upswing in the number and range of knowledge-sharing, informational, and educational applications for this and other personal mobile devices.

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