As a Data Scientist I love working with data. I especially enjoy creating stunning visuals to help make data insightful and actionable. As such I’m always interested to see new tools in the market. One area that really intrigues me is BI on mobile. Today, I don’t think there’s one product that addresses all of the needs of mobile BI particularly the social / sharing component. That said, there are some good ones out there. Here are two really good options I’ve been able to use.
Roambi
I spent some time in Solana Beach with the folks at Roambi and I think they have a stunning app. I had a chance to play with Roambi Analytics and Flow for several weeks and came to really love both. I think Roambi Analytics is probably the best Mobile BI app available when it comes to visualization and interactions. They now have a new app, Blink, that is free and allows you to do basic visualizations by importing CSV files from several cloud storage services (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, etc). This is a part of the latest version of Roambi Analytics. Once you download it, open the app and select “My Projects” to get started.
Vizable by Tableau
Tableau released a mobile app that is also free to use on iOS – Vizable. This is a great mobile BI app. The interactions are natural and easy-to-use. You can pinch to add fields, swipe to filter, drag to reorder, etc. The longest “training” video is only 10 minutes – it’s easy to use. It is also very simple to add data. Especially since it loads data from XLS and XLSX files (by comparison Roambi Blink uses CSV only) because these are more commonly used when sharing raw data within a company; you probably have one in your Inbox that you can add right now.
Unfortunately it does not include any social features and sharing is limited. You can share screen captures via Message, Email, etc but you’re not able to edit or annotate them before sharing. While there’s certainly more to be added I think you’ll enjoy using it. You can download it here.
