Try This Fun BI Holiday Shopping AppTry This Fun BI Holiday Shopping App

To celebrate the holiday season, visualization and analytic vendor TIBCO Spotfire has created this fun holiday gift finder (warning, unless you want the continuous jingle tune to draw the ire of co-workers, set your volume to low). I love these viral marketing apps from BI vendors that are not only fun to test drive but also informative!

According to Spotfire, the data in the gift finder is based on data from Amazon and includes prices, popularity rankings, and ratings for a subset of product categories. As I wrote about in the recent Intelligent Enterprise feature article on Cool BI, users can see the value of in-memory analytics in action here as you interact with data visually.

Spotfire holiday shopping app screen shot.
(click image for larger view)

On the "Shop" tab, you can view a bar chart of products grouped by price and readily filter them by product rating and category. What, no toys? The toys are in there but not assigned to a filterable category; use the product name search box to find toys (I won't digress on the data quality issue of how Amazon categorizes - or fails to categorize -its products).

Spotfire shopping app jewelry view.
(click image for larger view)

What I found interesting was the "Analyze tab," on which you can see what's most popular by price (see screen shot above). Though there are stereotypes about ladies being big spenders, it was revealing that the most popular high-end gifts are the typical "male toys" - TVs! (Tip: lasso around the dots to see a list of products in the bottom pane that then link back to Amazon.) And when I filter by rating, it's not the Sony I got my husband a few years ago, it's the Samsungs!

As we are all tightening the budget this year, I was curious about the most popular jewelry items (see screen shot at right) with a high rating but in the lower price end. I stumbled across these nice earrings for $155 to discover they are now on sale for $99. Maybe this gift finder is more than a fun demo after all.

Merry Christmas!

Cindi

Founder, BIScorecard, a resource for in-depth BI product reviews Author, Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer AppTo celebrate the holiday season, visualization and analytic vendor TIBCO Spotfire has created an in-memory-powered holiday gift finder. I love these viral marketing apps from BI vendors that are not only fun to test drive but also informative! The data in the gift finder is from Amazon and includes prices, popularity rankings, and product ratings...