What all constitutes BI? It seems like this is a perennially big subject and is easy to get lost!

Well, the answer is not simple and I do not claim to know the right answer to this question. So let me throw the question right back at you. Consider the following 3 scenarios:

1. In exhibit 1, I bring you the work of Charles Minard (1781-1870), a French civil engineer. “His best-known work, Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armee Français dans la campagne de Russe 1812-13, dramatically displays the number of Napoleon’s soldiers by the width of an ever-reducing band drawn across a map from France to Moscow. At its origin, a wide band shows 442,000 soldiers left France, narrowing across several hundred miles to100,000 men reaching Moscow. With a parallel temperature graph displaying deadly frigid Russian winter temperatures along the way, the band shrinks during the retreat to a pathetic thin trickle of 10,000 survivors returning to their homeland”. Check http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Minard.png

2. As exhibit 2, this article from the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/09/world/europe/20091109-berlinwallthennow.html), published on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin wall demolition, displays with its innovative photo mash-ups and adjoining commentary how life has changed for the better in unified Germany.

3. Finally, as exhibit set 3, let us move to sports. Check out the ubiquitous “worm” now well publicized in all televised cricket (http://www.cricinfo.com/zim-tri2010/engine/match/452150.html?view=graph) or the much more sophisticated Guardian Chalkboards (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/chalkboards) that allow you to create your own interactive visualizations to analyze player/team performance. Finally, for those looking forward to the football (soccer) world cup – here is the mother of all planners (http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html )

Now, do any or all of the above, fall under the umbrella of business intelligence? Your answer is as good as mine. What I do know of Business Intelligence is that, like our major cities, it constantly grows, evolves and stretches it boundaries.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/08/microsoft-beats-intel-amd-to-market-with-cpugpu-combo-chip.ars

“At Hot Chips today, Microsoft’s Xbox team unveiled details of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) that powers the newer, slimmer Xbox 360 250GB model. Produced on the IBM/GlobalFoundries 45nm process, it’s fair to say that the new SoC is the first mass-market, desktop-class processor to combine a CPU, GPU, memory, and I/O logic onto a single piece of silicon. “

What does this mean?

Apple is toast…Google is getting crisped! Microsoft at this point has redefined the computing landscape for all entities, hardware and software included, for the next decade. By defining and producing a piece of CPU + GPU, they have delivered on a new vision for computing for the 21st century. What’s more, if they rearchitect/optimize Windows for this platform, it could signal the end of “Unix.” This also means that Apple’s approach of OpenCL and nVidia’s approach to GPGPU are dead. Further this kills ARM technology since nothing in the ARM platform can deliver GPU level performance — and this design is already power efficient as well. Virtualization / cloud computing is dead as well!

What are Tree Maps?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemapping

History of tree maps from the “founder”:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/

(Also, downloadable tools for generating tree maps along with some excellent algorithms)

How can I create Tree Maps? Most leading commercial BI tools support creation of tree maps in their dashboards, but if you don’t have access to one and want to play with and understand it, you could do worse than go here:

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Treemap.html

“Many eyes” is a great place for your information visualization needs!
A good example of tree-maps that I stumbled upon yesterday is here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10187248.stm.

The interesting stuff on supercomputers is a bonus!