Lumira Cloud supposedly gives SAP an answer to the recent explosion in the cloud-based, self-service data visualization offerings. The HTML5-built BI service comes with a “monthly” subscription fee (albeit one that can only be ordered in annual chunks) and lets its users publish and share data visualizations with one another for viewing or editing on desktop or mobile devices.

SAP Lumira Cloud appears to be more an Dropbox-ish add-on for the desktop version of Lumira than a cloud-based replacement, but it does also allow the creation of datasets from Excel documents. The service, which integrates with on-premise data and naturally supports HANA, can also be used to share SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio files and SAP Crystal Reports documents.

This release appears to be the culmination of what SAP has been previously referring to as “project Photon” – supposedly the company’s “true departmental self-service BI offering.” The issue here, of course, is the monumental and somewhat confusing nature of the company’s portfolio. After all, doesn’t SAP already do this SME-courting, departmental analytics stuff through its BusinessObjects BI OnDemand product?

Try visiting at least one of the BI OnDemand product pages and you’ll be taken through to the Lumira page. Look at the Lumira Cloud FAQs and you’ll be told that BI OnDemand will continue to run “in parallel” to Lumira Cloud, but also that OnDemand customers can contact their account representative “to discuss the best timing and strategy” for migrating to the new service.

Perhaps this less-than-clear situation presages a simplification of SAP’s portfolio – no doubt more will be revealed at the company’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference this week. If it doesn’t, customers in search of next-generation data visualization tools have many far more straightforward options to check out.

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During one panel, the assertion that data science is dead was indeed debated. Along with the habitual tension between end user requirements for businesses and consumers and the “elitist” ideas of data scientists and engineers, other themes explored included increasing accessibility to data, as well as changing behaviors and encouraging better decision-making with data. Everyone from sales and marketing people to fitness enthusiasts, it turns out, can be motivated by pretty pictures.

As IBM’s Alah Keahey put it during a panel, “there is a hunger for friendly data,” and visualization can help to humanize those threatening terabytes. Here are a selection of new, and new-to-us, visualization tools that came up at the meeting.

Bringing climate change home: Databasin.org

A mapping and analytics platform from the Conservation Biology Institute that has 10,000 datasets on everything you need to understand how extreme weather will impact natural resources, renewable energy, and endangered species. Here is one projection of maximum temperatures in 2080.

Sparkvis by Chloe Fan

This app is for the quantified self junkie who loves to interpret their burned calories as abstract art. The research behind the colorful display of Fitbit (see disclosure) data is explained here. Image via QuantifiedSelf.com

Disqus Gravity

The commenting platform’s diverse content is brought together in an interactive and live visualization. Pulling from about 500 sites that use Disqus, Gravity brings together the “small” data of individual comments within the context of 11 content categories. Another visualization, Orbital, shows realtime comments geolocated on a spinning globe.

IBM Many Eyes

Originally conceived by visualization guru Martin Wattenberg and colleagues in 2007, Many Eyes lets you plug in any dataset and generate nifty figures. Here, for example, is the distribution of U.S. foreign aid over a 60-year period.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.

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Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Portugal-based Webdetails’ 20 or so employees have impressive skills as visual artists and have a sense of how data scientists want to explore data, said CEO Quentin Gallivan said in an interview on Friday. They also have the know-how to produce compelling embedded analytics tools for Pentaho customers. Many customers want embedded analytics to be customized with special user-interface details and custom skins, Gallivan said, “so it looks exactly like their application. It can’t look like a (business-intelligence) tool.”

The Webdetails staff has previously made Pentaho plug-ins such as tools for creating dashboards. The Webdetails employees will also contribute visualization input to the summer and fall releases of Pentaho’s Instaview feature for analyzing data sets from Hadoop, MongoDB and other sources, Gallivan said.

The data-analytics market has been busy as of late. QlikView hit Nasdaq in 2010, and earlier this month Tableau Software filed to go public, too. Meanwhile, legacy players such as Microstrategy and SAP have stuck around in the business-intelligence space. To keep adding customers in such a lively area, other players need to bolster their own offerings and help further democratize data. That’s what seems to be happening with this deal.

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Tuesday, Seattle-based Tableau filed for an IPO with an initial “placeholder” value of up to $150 million. Unlike many tech companies going this route, Tableau is profitable, with net income of $2.7 million in 2010, $3.4 million in 2011, and $1.6 million in 2012. Its revenue more than doubled last year to $127 million. It also boasts an impressive customer list including Bank of America, Barclays, Pfizer, Goldman Sachs and others.

Total venture funding for the company, which will trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “DATA,” stands at $15 million in two rounds, both from NEA.

Tableau is not the first new-look data visualization company to go public.  Competitor QlikView went public in July 2010 at $15 per share and is now trading at $24.70. Splunk, which analyzes and visualizes machine data, went public last August at $17 per share and is now trading at just over $39 per share.

The company’s challenge going forward will be to keep up the pace it has set thus far with its “80+ percent year-over-year growth,” said Ovum analyst Fredric Tunvall.  The company will clearly need to keep investing and it may be hard to manage shareholder expectations based on past performance, he said in a statement.

At the same time it must add more advanced and richer analytics to the mix and factor in back-end data management capabilities including data integration, data quality and master data management, Tunvall added in a research note.

QLIK data by YCharts

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It’s an update to the a physical map Peer1 did in 2011, that was also awesome, but thanks to the Android and iOS apps you can now play around with the map in a global view or a network view. The global view is like one of those satellite images of city lights at night with glowing dots representing connections. The network view is a bit more esoteric, clustering those with the most connections at one end.

The network view.

It’s pretty basic, focusing mostly on the names of the players and how many connections they have to others on the net. For example it shows Hurricane Electric and Level 3 with more than a thousand connections to other peers while Google has 59. Apple and Facebook have 32 and 17 respectively. The app also allows you to perform a traceroute to measure how long it takes packets to traverse the networks, but that function wasn’t working on the iOS version I downloaded.

A global view with provider info.

There’s also a little timeline where you can watch how the internet spreads with more providers and connection points popping up. As for why Peer1 did an app instead of a poster or even a web site, Rajan Sodhi of PEER 1 said via email:

“We decided to go with a mobile app for phones and tablets because we wanted to take advantage of the human gesturing – tapping, pinching, swiping, panning, rotating, etc – to make a more interactive and immersive experience for the user. The internet is complex, as the user can see, and we want to simplify or humanize it to make it more understandable.”

I can’t wait to show my daughter as just one more way to explain how we’re all connected using the internet. This isn’t an app you’d use every day, but it is a beautiful way to show someone what the internet looks like.

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At the Visualized Conference in New York City Friday, Carter explained how he and the NYT’s graphics team came up with their “Paths to the White House” tool. Carter began by looking at past tools the paper had used — all the way back to the 1896 election, in which William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryant. The morning after the election, the NYT ran a color-coded electoral map on its front page: white states for McKinley, black for Bryant. “They got some states wrong,” Carter said, but “everyone knows how to read this.”

There are several problems with color-coded electoral maps, though, Carter said. First, there’s the “area problem” (many states that are large in geographic size have a small number of electoral votes). The maps may also look very similar across elections even when the results are different. Carter showed red and blue electoral maps from the past four elections and at a glance they all look the same. If you make a color-coded map more interactive — allowing a user to click a state and fill it with a new color, for example — that overrides any information the New York Times has added: “The more you use it, the less useful it is.” Finally, Carter said, these maps are just “boring” and “not very fun.” (Which isn’t to say that the NYT abandoned them completely — the “President Map” illustrating this post is another tool the paper offered this year.)

Carter and the graphics team ultimately came up with “512 Paths to the White House” (when he showed it on the projector, the audience cheered). Users could create their own paths. “We struggle a lot with stepping people through things or letting them explore themselves,” Carter said. The NYT decided that users could test their own paths, but there were annotations for highlighted paths at the bottom of the page to help them get context.

Disclosure: GigaOM is a media partner for the Visualized Conference.

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The problem with much of that software, however, is that it puts design into the hands of people who aren’t designers. The result: A lot of heinous color combinations and 3-D pie charts.

Infogr.am, which launched in beta this week, is aiming to fix that problem. Basically, Infogr.am’s designers design—and the rest of us just insert the information we want to visualize. The Latvia-based startup offers 20 free animated and embeddable infographic and chart templates. Much like Google’s Fusion Tables, Infogr.am provides templates complete with data showing a best-use scenario. But unlike Fusion Tables, Infogr.am provides an easy way to combine charts, video, maps and images into an overall cohesive design.

The founder of Infogr.am, Uldis Leiterts, admits Infogr.am has some kinks, and I noticed a few of them when I tried out the service: Switching between charts on an infographic can be cumbersome (but doing so can also be cumbersome on the markedly more expensive Adobe Illustrator); the rows and columns within spreadsheets aren’t as easy to move around as they are on Excel or even Google; and it’s difficult to see each separate graphic as you’re building it because all the graphics and media stack on top of each other

But despite these wrinkles, the resulting infographics are very attractive.

Part of Infogr.am’s charm is it doesn’t offer many opportunities to screw up. The program is highly customizable with the data and media one can add, but it limits design options to given themes and styles, which in my opinion prevents some serious design mishaps. For example, one can’t (as of now) change the font. While that might seem unfortunate to people who want to express themselves through typography, the fonts as they are match their design templates—so no garish, mismatched font families.

After all, the basic point of creating graphics is to be able to communicate information clearly and easily. While good fonts can improve the user experience, bad ones can hurt it—using the fonts that come with the templates is safe.

“It’s designed in a way that you can’t make anything ugly,” said Leiterts, a graphic designer who worked for 10 years at Latvian news organizations. “It’s built for simplicity so we are careful in adding features that can pollute the experience with too many options.”

Here’s how it works: You pick a template, insert or upload your data through a built-in spreadsheet, add extra charts and media where necessary, and type in the appropriate text. The infographic is instantly publishable on social media or on your own website with an embed code.

Using the stock data examples on Infogr.am, I made this in five minutes.

While the basic tools will remain free, to generate revenue, Leiterts plans to offer a “really affordable” premium subscription-based portion of Infogr.am targeted at online publishers. Hopefully the premium addition won’t add too many frills.

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The solution is an elegant example of translating institutional knowledge about how Facebook’s cache systems work into a easy-to-understand data visualization that allows others to quickly spot a problem and fix it. Sean Lynch, a Facebook engineer, described how, with tens of thousands of memcache servers and a caching graph database called TAO, it was sometimes hard to quickly figure out when a faulty cache was bogging down the system.

Caching is one of the most essential features of the Facebook infrastructure because it keeps the data stored most often closer to the web servers, delivering content to users as fast as possible. This is essential when you realize that Facebook is pulling up content such as photos on the Timeline on a scrolling basis.

Claspin in action. Green is good.

So caching is a really big deal to keep the user experience high. But Lynch writes that the social network had no way to troubleshoot the cache. From the post:

Facebook has two major cache systems: Memcache, which is a simple lookaside cache with most of its smarts in the client, and TAO, a caching graph database that does its own queries to MySQL. Between these two systems, we have literally thousands of charts, some of which are collected into dashboards showing various latency, request rate, and error rate statistics collected by clients and servers. Most of these graphs and dashboards are backed by Facebook’s “Operations Data Store,” or ODS. This worked well at first, but as Facebook grew both in size and complexity, it became more and more difficult to figure out which piece was broken when something went wrong. So I started thinking about encoding the “tribal knowledge” we used for troubleshooting in a way that would make it easy for people to assess the status of cache at a glance.

Lynch developed algorithms to rank what metrics are most important indicators of cache health, based on his team’s knowledge, and then decided to show the results of that number crunching using a heat map that could capture 10,000 servers on a single screen. The color changes were backed by 30 or more stats being calculated in the background in real-time. He dubbed the tool Claspin, and its use is spreading inside Facebook –arguably the sign of success in the engineering-dominated company.

Facebook’s dedication to better tooling reminds me of Dell’s fanatical efforts to improve production at its factories, measuring everything from table height to where pieces were laid out for assembly. Facebook’s attention here is similar in that these types of tools help it ensure that the network and the ad revenue generated by the network are optimized at all times. Facebook is developing its own Six Sigma or Kaizen efforts for the web.

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With ESX Platform, companies that use MeLLMo’s Roambi software to create and publish visualizations and reports that are heavy with interactive charts and graphs, will be able to publish those reports publicly on Apple’s iOS App Store. That way, companies that specialize in information can sell reports or case studies created with Roambi as one-off apps without having to hire an application developer — Roambi will do that for them.

The reports that are published as apps will have both brand names, Roambi’s and the company’s own. But the revenue from the app’s sale through Apple’s App Store will go to the company — with Apple taking its traditional 30 percent App Store cut. The customer can customize the app’s splash screen so it feels as close to their own brand as possible when someone buys the app and views it on their 9.7-inch iPad screen. But then once inside the app, they’ll see the Roambi view of content. “Users will feel like it’s an application experience designed around their content,” explained Quinton Alsbury, CEO of MeLLmo.

MeLLmo is volunteering to act as your app development shop — for pay, of course, but the pricing is still to be determined later. Said Alsbury:

For a lot of companies, if customers purchase info from them, the delivery mechanism is an email with a Powerpoint, or and Excel spreadsheet. Now they can package it up into whatever visualization they want from the available suite and have it be their app, and they can sell it or they can give it away.

But what Roambi is doing isn’t just emblematic of how mobile is changing how we do business and consumer information. It also illustrates the iPad’s progression as an enterprise tool. First it began popping up in the executive suite (subscription required) as a tool for individuals who were a little ahead of the tech curve to check their corporate email or read spreadsheets. Then apps came out that turned the iPad into terminals for accessing companies’ internal networks and data, which was especially brilliant for remote workers — and IT departments started getting on board.

Now one of those, Roambi, known for its innovative way of using the iPad to present data that is helpful to how they do business, is helping companies look outward. In this way its customers are not just using the iPad to view and consume data, but Apple’s mobile platform as a way to distribute data.

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