Saylor believes that once past the initial disruption, mobile technology will spark a new information revolution, bringing mankind to a higher level of existence. He presents this book as a map, meant to guide one through an uncharted mobile space which he often refers to as “cyberspace.” Saylor sees the mobile wave as a type of tsunami that one can either ride or be swallowed by.

With that being said, his goal in writing this book is to share his map with the world, for everyone to examine, study, and use to cruise past the rapidly approaching time of disruption. In an attempt to reach this goal of serving the greater good, MicroStrategy has donated copies of the book to university libraries across the county.

We would also like to offer all of its followers a chance to win a free copy of The Mobile Wave. 

Sign up here for your free copy.

With MicroStrategy Cloud Personal, you can create any number of interactive visualizations to analyze your data in different ways. You can organize your visualizations using tabs and panels, and then apply filters to refine your view and improve your analysis.

Tabs and panels let you control how to apply filters throughout the different visualizations in your dashboard. Let’s learn more about these helpful tools:

Panels

A panel is the area where you will create and interact with your visualization. Each panel can contain one visualization, but you can insert any number of panels to apply different views to your data. As you add new panels, dots located at the top right will let you navigate through your visualizations.

 Tabs

A tab is a collection of panels. Each tab can contain one or more panels, but a particular panel can only belong to one tab. you can add as many tabs to your dashboard as you want, and switching between them is as easy as clicking on the desired tab.

MicroStrategy Cloud Personal applies filters at the tab level. In other words, all the panels contained under one tab will share the same filter criteria, whereas panels contained under a different tab can have different criteria.

Take a look at these examples:

1. Here we have two panels contained within the same tab. Notice that the same filter criteria is applied to both visualizations.

2. In contrast, our second example shows panels contained within separate tabs. Notice that the filter criteria applied is different.

In summary, insert panels under the same tab when you want your visualizations to share the same filter criteria. If you want to apply different filters, insert new tabs.

MicroStrategy Cloud Personal is a better way to analyze your data. Sign up for your free account today and start having fun with visualizations!

• In 2011, we received significant recognition from analysts in the business intelligence (BI) space. Gartner, Inc. placed MicroStrategy in the ‘Leaders’ Quadrant in the “2011 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms” research report.
• Analyst Howard Dresner ranked MicroStrategy as the #1 overall Mobile BI vendor in the DAS Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study.

• In July 2011, MicroStrategy World traveled to Monte Carlo and introduced MicroStrategy Social Intelligence. This technology leverages Facebook’s continuously updated user base of 800+ million to help companies more effectively engage their customers and build brand loyalty with personalized communication.

• As predicted by many analysts, cloud computing and software as a service were key BI trends in 2011. In 2011 we announced MicroStrategy Cloud. This enterprise offering, which is integrated with ParAccel’s analytic engine, provides a fast and easy way of delivering BI, mobile, and social applications.

• We introduced a free business intelligence solution for everyone with MicroStrategy Cloud Personal. Users can analyze data with rich visualizations and share powerful insights in just minutes.

• Four new social applications, Alert, Emma, Usher, and Wisdom Personal, were our first foray into consumer product offerings. Alert helps you organize your favorite Facebook pages; Emma is the friendly marketplace that allows you to trade goods and services with confidence; Usher is the coolest way to manage your Facebook Events; and Wisdom provides a level of insight into your social graph never before possible.

• MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone was selected as one of the top five business iPhone apps of the year in Apple’s iTunes Rewind 2011.

• MicroStrategy 9.2 became available earlier this year and includes significant new features such as Visual Insight, more interactivity with dashboards, greater use of high-speed in-memory BI, and more. These new features provide faster and easier data analysis.

• Groupon, a daily deal site that has subscribers in more than 500 markets across the world, selected MicroStrategy’s BI platform to analyze its daily deals and gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior. Other customers, including CareSource and Jetsetter, saw the value in selecting MicroStrategy Mobile and Enterprise BI solutions for their businesses.

• MicroStrategy’s new Business Intelligence Workshop Series comprises three free, one-day, hands-on workshops, introducing BI from the perspective of a business user, IT developer, and mobile user.

• In July 2011, we held the first Social Media Marketing and Intelligent Commerce Summit (SMiCS). The conference featured insightful guest speakers Don Peppers, Tim Campos, and Brian Solis, attendees learned the value of social media and how MicroStrategy technology helps companies to leverage social media data.

Today we’re excited to introduce MicroStrategy’s first SaaS-based BI solution – MicroStrategy Cloud Personal! With Cloud Personal, you can upload data to the MicroStrategy Cloud, analyze it via rich visualizations with just a few clicks, and share powerful insights with colleagues or friends in a matter of minutes.

Fast and Free

Any user can experience the power of Cloud Personal instantly. Upload data from your own spreadsheet, try our sample data, or check out our Gallery to see what you can do with Cloud Personal. Best of all, it’s FREE!

Share and Win

MicroStrategy is pleased to invite you to enter in our Get to Know Us Giveaway, where you can win the latest and greatest tool for business intelligence – the Apple iPad 2!

This contest is open to fans new and old, whether you’re just getting to learn about our BI technology or whether you’ve followed our trail of innovations for 20 years. You’ve seen the iPad in action at conferences, classes, and tradeshows all over the business world already. Win an iPad 2 for yourself today, and stay connected everywhere you go. It’s the most versatile tool for the modern mobile worker.

Hint: You need only enter once. This means the earlier you get your entry in, the more chances you have to win one of the remaining iPad 2s!

To submit your entry, visit our giveaway tab on our Facebook Fan Page and fill out a short entry form.

The iPad 2 giveaway is currently limited to North American residents only. MicroStrategy has many fans all over the world, so we’re hoping to make future contests available to more countries – stay tuned! No purchase necessary. Limit 1 entry per person. Sweepstakes ends August 5, 2011. Restrictions apply – see Official Rules: http://bit.ly/ipad2-mstr-rules

This webcast will feature an exclusive preview of MicroStrategy Transaction Services and demos on the iPad and iPhone. You’ll get valuable insight into the latest Mobile and Transactions capabilities from MicroStrategy.

Our presenters are:

• Dan Kerzner, Senior Vice President, Mobile at MicroStrategy
• Eric de Roos, Senior Director, Product Management at MicroStrategy
• Hugh Owen, Director, Mobile Marketing at MicroStrategy

The webcast will be online 9 AM, 12 PM, and 3 PM EDT on Wednesday, June 15th, 2011. We’ll be on-hand to answer questions tagged with the Twitter hashtag #mstrcast.

Register for free now!

“Unique capabilities aside, the number of people that can carry a smartphone is significantly greater than the number of people that take a laptop with them when away from the office.” – The Convergence of Mobile Technology and Mobile Intelligence

Last July, MicroStrategy announced the arrival of MicroStrategy Mobile. Since then, there’s been a lot of excitement and discussion about how this mobile BI app platform has empowered organizations to create their own intuitive, powerful applications which take full advantage of the capabilities of the iPhone and iPad.

If you haven’t already seen the announcement for the new industry apps that have been added to MicroStrategy Mobile for iPad and iPhone, here’s a summary of what you can find in our updated version. I encourage you to download it for free (iPad and iPhone), then share with us your comments and any questions you might have.

The Telecommunications Channel App allows you to analyze and compare successes across multiple customer revenue channels and touchpoints, such as web, in-store, and call centers. This sample app shows just how easy it is to measure important analytics for greater customer retention and increased revenue.

Our new Retail Management App lets buyers and merchandise managers quickly view their highest and lowest selling products to make informed shipment and markdown decisions. If you’re a retailer, you already know how information can empower you to better choose how much inventory to order and what kind of markdowns and promotions really drive in customers. So have MicroStrategy help you answer this: What’s your seasonal sell-through? Which products are losing you money? What are your best-sellers?

For swift casino operation on the move, MicroStrategy’s Casino Management App frees managers from the desk and lets them measure the essential factors in their gaming world:

• Financial performance
• Gaming activity levels and revenues
• Daily table and slot performance
• Entertainment and promotions
• Lodging operations

I’m continuing the coverage we’ve provided on our blog with more news from MicroStrategy World 2011! If you missed our previous updates, read the blog posts summarizing Michael Saylor’s keynote (Tuesday, January 25) and Mark LaRow’s keynote (Wednesday, January 26). MicroStrategy’s keynote presentations announced the arrival of three waves in technology which are sweeping through the economy: Mobile, Cloud, and Social. On the product front, we announced Transaction Services, Cloud Intelligence, and Visual Exploration, which I’ll describe in more detail below, as well as a number of other updates.

Announcements from our side included the upcoming MicroStrategy Transaction Services, which connects mobile devices with back-end transaction systems and databases. Transaction Services allows users to quickly make transactions such as directly adding information to the database or reordering a product based on information accessed through scanning a barcode, for example. This writeback capability connects mobile apps with transactional systems to offer capabilities BI users haven’t had before. We’ll have more details on MicroStrategy Transaction Services shortly.

There is huge potential for vendors in what Michael Saylor called an impending “mobile payment war” if they can respond to the changing landscape of business. An increasingly mobile, real-time business scene calls for a revised approach to understanding customers on the front end, and the entire supply chain involved in providing products and services. It’s vital to understand who you’re really trying to reach to get an edge over your competitors and not get left behind (or “RedLasered” as Saylor put it, referring to the mobile app for scanning barcodes in stores to compare prices online).

In the Tuesday general session, we talked about other updates and enhancements to MicroStrategy Mobile, including new visualizations:

• Map Network Visualization: See how nodes of geographical data connect and relate to each other to monitor complex travel routes.
• Calendar Visualization: View color-coded key dates on a daily, weekly, or monthly calendar and select calendar events to reveal more information.
• Heat Map Visualization: Identify performance issues in large, complex data sets using a highly interactive analysis map that allows the user to color-code data by metric values, filter data, and add/remove business attributes and metrics for more detailed analysis.

The demo of the Airport Activity Analysis app showed off the use of a map network visualization to view airline routes and specific metrics. This app is included with MicroStrategy Mobile for iPad, available for download in the App Store, so I encourage you to check it out for yourself. The mention of Near Field Communication was also well-received by the audience, who were excited to see how mobile devices could be used to greater potential for mobile payment, tracking, and more.

MicroStrategy Cloud Intelligence generated great discussion among attendees, who immediately recognized the value in this offering. Cloud Intelligence can be a means of providing the best configuration, support, and maintenance straight from MicroStrategy by offering it through the cloud. Stay tuned for more information on Cloud Intelligence shortly!

Another announcement was MicroStrategy Visual Exploration, a feature we presented on Wednesday. Visual Exploration will be included as a feature of MicroStrategy Report Services. It allows users to easily visualize data to perform quick analysis and share the results with others in their business.

Not least, MicroStrategy presented customer awards for the “Best Practices in Business Intelligence.” These categories and recipients for 2011 are as follows:

• Extranet Deployment: CVS Caremark
• High Performance and Scalability: Starbucks
• Advanced Analytics: LinkedIn
• Mobile Deployment: Novation
• Enterprise Deployment: Société Générale
• Individual Excellence in Business Intelligence: Julio Ortiz, Sears’ Divisional Vice President

Congratulations to all our winners! I’m very impressed with everything I’ve seen customers create so far with MicroStrategy, and I’m sure that these BI solutions will only continue to grow more impressive and useful moving forward.

It goes without saying that we’ll only get busier from now on. For those who attended MicroStrategy World 2011, presentations will be posted to our website soon. Keep following us for more news about the future of business intelligence!

Thank you to all who joined us at MicroStrategy World 2011! For more perspectives on the event, see:

• Discussions on Twitter about #mstrworld and @MicroStrategy.
• Posts from all four days of MicroStrategy World 2011 from DataFusion Technologies
• BIScorecard Founder and Analyst Cindi Howson’s article in InformationWeek, “MicroStrategy Revs Up Mobile Computing”

And mark your calendars now for our next MicroStrategy World – July 11th through 14th in Monte Carlo!

Tony presented details of Coca-Cola’s Bottler and Customer Analytics Dashboard and iPad App.  He stressed how important it was to have as close to real-time data as possible on retailers and activity so that the decisions and workflow in the field could really move forward.  And he mentioned that being able to easily compare current year information to previous year stats was really essential for goal-setting and actions.

Bruce presented details of GUESS? Inc.’s now infamous product and buyer’s analysis dashboard and iPad App.  Bruce has spoken at many of our events and always leaves the audience wanting more due to both his dynamic nature and, more importantly, to the great work product they have.  They’ve built an application first in Flash and now on the iPad that allows merchandisers and buyers to view results and trends by product and store to identify problem and opportunity areas.  It is a beautiful dashboard filled with product photos.  It had the audience and the Twitter stream buzzing for sure.

After they completed, Mark took the stage to update the audience on the state of MicroStrategy products, focusing on two big themes…

1. High Performance – Mark stressed how high performance BI remains a CRITICAL theme to MicroStrategy, and that we will continue to focus on it with all of our new features and new product releases.  Specifically, he pointed to how:
   1. Mobile BI is driving performance requirements higher and higher
   2. MicroStrategy Health Center gives better visibility to issues, problems, and solutions in their BI environment
   3. MicroStrategy delivers 6x the capacity and 3x faster response in latest releases, due to lots of specific enhancements
   4. Incremental Refresh on in-memory cubes is coming soon and will make them even higher performing and more usable
2. Visual Exploration – The last big product announcement at MicroStrategy World 2011 is the launch of Visual Exploration.  This offering enables business users to explore their own data via much more visual techniques and really makes self-service with MicroStrategy even more powerful.  Product Marketing Director Brian Brinkmann assisted Mark with some great demonstrations of the new product.  Some of the highlights included:
   1. Visual exploration gives business users many of the strengths of OLAP and Dashboards (ad-hoc investigation, on-screen selectors, graphical visualization) without many of the weaknesses
   2. Visual exploration enables business users to become even more powerful and publish even more analytics without having to rely on IT or other analysts to do the work for them
   3. It is all done with drag-and-drop, click and select, easy-to-use functionality
   4. Great visualizations like interactive heat maps, area-selecting maps, and graph matrices make visual exploration quite powerful to an end user

It’s a shame that the announcement of Visual Exploration had to get moved to the end of the Day 2 keynote (due to the other great announcements on Mobile, Transaction Services, and Cloud Intelligence), because it really is a fantastic new offering.  The Twitter stream was buzzing with how useful this will be to business users and I personally had at least 4 conversations after the event with account executives and customers who were very impressed and definitely wanted to use it.  Graphical, easy-to-use features are ALWAYS a success with customers.

Finally, Mark closed today’s keynote with a review of the “top things” everyone should do in BI when they leave this conference.  He focused on four big topics, basically telling the audience to “get prepared” for what is coming and what they’ll have available to them.  Specifically he discussed:

1. Release of MicroStrategy 9.2 – This is the release that will include visual exploration, transaction services, and all of the new mobile features, so the crowd needs to start getting ready!
2. Mobile BI – As mobile intelligence from MicroStrategy keeps getting more useful, more powerful, and easier to use, everyone needs to start building their plans and storylines for their mobile apps
3. High Performance – With 64-bit and many performance enhancements available, everyone should be looking into making their implementation even faster, to ensure that Mobile BI and Transaction Services can thrive in their environment.
4. Transaction Services – The release of transaction support will open up new doors for organizations, and everyone should start looking around for where this will make sense

As with Day 1, it was yet another content-packed two hours with product announcements, customer success stories, and demonstrations.  We probably need to start thinking about three-hour keynotes moving forward…

So you get the feel for it, here’s the final setup of the general session room and the stage, filled to the gills with people.

“You may not be interested in technology, but technology is interested in you.” Making the famous quote relevant to these conference-goers and, more broadly, today’s economy, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor sets the stage for a record-setting conference.

If you’ve been to MicroStrategy World before, you’ve seen the large size of the keynote session. Today? You’ll need to about double what you’re seeing in your head. The room has seats for more than 1,800, and is completely full. And the overflow rooms where the video simulcast is being played are also full. There are more than 2,000 people here, making this the biggest event we’ve had in years.

First on stage, after a rocking dance act, is Michael Saylor to present his vision for the future of information consumption, the future of business intelligence, and the future of interacting with customers, friends, fans, and peers. He’s about as motivated as I’ve ever seen him be on the stage, even more than he was last year when introducing MicroStrategy Mobile.

His main message is about how the advancements in mobile technology and its combination with social networking are creating opportunities and business models that have never been seen before. And MicroStrategy is not only well positioned to react to these advancements, but is also focusing on them to ensure that all of our customers take advantage of them as well.

Some of his big points:

• MicroStrategy is going to roll out enhanced Mobile services, support for Mobile Transactions, and Cloud-based offerings this quarter
• Mobile is making all web-based applications obsolete
• There will be a mobile payment war as developers and vendors struggle to win the multi-billion dollar market that is looming
• Mobile is reaching people better – “There has never been a time in the history of the world where you can write a piece of software and have it be deployed to 100 million people in 41 days.”
• Cloud Intelligence will enable customers to save time in installation, building, testing, and configuring and get the best configuration, the best support, and the best maintenance from MicroStrategy directly, via the Cloud
• Cloud-based offerings will let MicroStrategy keep more customers happy by bringing them value faster and more consistently
• The REAL opportunity with Social Media is not the ability to interact with your friends, it’s the ability to tap into the networks of friends, fans, and followers for directly personalized customer service and offerings
• Social Media, and really Facebook, is the most up-to-date “customer database” in existence, due to the self-user-update paradigm
• Rather than seeing a newspaper ad, where the customer response is delayed due to all the steps your customer would have to take, instead I react immediately from offers that are then broadcasted to all of my “friends and fans”
• Due to the user interacting with the social network, as long as your customers, fans, or friends don’t “deactivate you”, the data you have from Facebook is good, clean, and fresh. Forever.

Michael summarized with the following: Business Intelligence itself is now leaping out of the back office and into the hands of the people who need it. And it has therefore made it ten times more valuable. Mobile transactions, cloud intelligence, and interacting with social media give users and the business audience the ability to get, see, and do exactly what they want when and where they want it. All of this is coming, and we see it all around us. The things we used to think were “products” are now software – processes, media, services, security. Whoever has the best software is going to win the customers’ mind and their wallet.

Forward thinking, revolutionary, and certainly motivating… and this was just day one. Stay tuned for more!

P.S. Become a MicroStrategy fan today! And if you’re at World, stop by our booth for a free t-shirt.