Ultan Technologies works with MasterCard International to help Launch their New Open API Developer Portal

On May 25th MasterCard International announced that they are going to "Unleash Payment Innovation by Launching New Open API Developer Portal. Select MasterCard Payment and Data Services Will be Released via Open API to Worldwide Software Developer Community to Create New, Innovative Payment Applications"

We are delighted to have played a major part in helping MasterCard develop this strategy for all of their software services.

We are now working with them to ensure that their implementation of this Open API and Developer Portal is delivered to the expected standards.

To see the full press release see here.

This was a big story in the Payments world and it was picked up by thousands of newspapers and blogs around the world. Examples can be seen on the New York Times web site and on the TechCrunch blog.

Firms in Ireland falling behind in use of analysis - survey

I spotted the article with this heading in the Irish Times on April 9th - see here.

The article mentions a study by Accenture which says "senior managers have limited access to enterprise-wide data and analytical talent, hindering the ability to make decisions and preventing them from gaining insight that could deliver better results".

"Siloed data, outdated technology and a lack of skilled staff are contributing to the problem".

If you would like more information on how Business Intelligence tools can resolve all of these issues, read this section of our website or contact us here.

The Irish Times article may be in the archives by the time you read this. If so, other articles on the study are on Accenture's website (where you can download the study), here and finally here.

Ireland's Unemployment (2005-2010)

This motion chart is also using the Google gadget (there are others available). This time I've used regional data available on the CSO site here.

I've varied the use a bit to show how versatile the gadget is and how you can use it to highlight a particular trend in your data. I wanted to concentrate on the changing rate of unemployment, so I made all of the bubbles the same size and got them to change colour according to the rate of unemployment. A snapshot of the starting and ending states really shows the change over the years - see the first two images below.

You can change the chart type to be a bar chart or a line graph, hide some regions, speed up or slow down the playback motion, change the dimensions depicted on either axis and add trails to the bubbles to see how things have changed over time.

In the third screen shot below I have used the line graph facility, selected Dublin and the Border region and then set the opacity of all the rest to zero.

In the fourth one, I set the "trails" feature to "on", selected Dublin and Midlands and then started play in Week 10, 2008. You can see how the unemployment rate is diverging.

Motion Chart demonstrating changes in Live Register numbers over 5 years

Wait for the chart to load and then press the "play" symbol to see the chart in action.

Be patient - it may take a while to load the first time you visit this site. There may be some problems viewing it with some versions of flash and Internet Explorer - see the bottom of this article for more details.

• In these charts the colours and sizes of the circles are used to display additional attributes.
• Each entity (county in this case) can be selected and tracked over time.
• You can hover over any of the circles to see the relevant data for that circle for the selected week.
• You can change the X and Y axes to use any of the available data
• You can select regions (e.g. the border region) to see the data for the counties in that region
• You can change the X and Y axes to use linear or logarithmic scales
  

A larger version displaying all of the controls can be seen here.

Use our contact page if you would like to know more about this Google gadget and how you could use it to help you analyze and understand your data better.

I first spotted these charts in http://www.gapminder.com/ and I checked out whether I could use them for a client's data. It turns out that Google bought the company that owned the technology and you can use it for free.

I created the example above using data from the CSO on Ireland's unemployment figures. It's the same data as I used in a previous article that demonstrated dynamic maps (now updated with data up to and including January 2010 - see here).

See the the data notes in a pdf file for details on the data sources, the manipulations performed on the data and the assumptions that were made.

Problems viewing the chart?
You may need to use Firefox or Safari (or upgrade your version of Flash) to view this demo. I have sometimes noticed problems with Google motion charts when using Internet Explorer with Flash version 9. I will try to sort them out, but in the meantime, try another browser. When using chrome, right-click on the chart and select "open frame in new window" if it does not work immediately.

Using dynamic maps to make sense of your business data

Unemployment in Ireland - updated Feb 2010



This is a free mapping gadget from Ammap with which you can display your data in a dynamic or static manner. On the scroll control at the bottom of the gadget you can press Pause or Play or drag the control to see the data for any particular date.

Lots of companies track figures like customers, vehicles, products for sale, products being delivered, money owed, offices, sales data, etc by location.

For example, companies may wish to track their sales per county in Ireland. They might want to compare figures between periods or across sales staff - "how many cars have we sold in Cavan in 2008 and can we compare that to the numbers for 2007 or 2006?".

There are several ways to display this information - Business Intelligence tools can provide you with similar mapping functionality as well as hundreds of other types of charting options. See above for the number of unemployed people per county in Ireland as a percentage of that county's total estimated population.

In the demo I have used Ammap's "timeline" example to map figures generated from data on the CSO website (www.cso.ie). This data includes details of the numbers of people signing on the Live Register in the various counties of Ireland over the past 5 years. See the data notes for details on the data sources, the manipulations performed on the data and the assumptions that were made.

As well as demonstrating the use of this type of charting option, this chart also demonstrates the importance of really understanding the data you have presented in any format. It also demonstrates the need to explain any anomalies to readers.

For example, it seems that the percentage in Meath is extremely low compared to the rest of the country. I'm not really sure why this is the case, but as it's based on the number of people signing on in Employement Exchanges located within that county, it could be because people living in Meath are actually signing on in exchanges located in different counties (e.g. Drogheda, Dundalk, Dublin). Further analysis would be required.

[update on 8th Jan: Thanks to Mark Sammon for the link to this description of the live register numbers].

[update on 16th Feb: Figures added for Oct '09, Dec '09 and Jan '10].


Some notes on how this was created

• The data is taken directly from various sections of the CSO web site as described in the data notes. It could just have easily be taken from any database or application your company has.
• After downloading the data from the CSO website, I created a spreadsheet that automatically creates an XML data file that the ammap widget reads. There are several ways to create these XML files directly from your database or application data.

Additional functionality that could be added

• Drill down - when you click on one area, a new map with more detail on that area opens up to display additional data (for example, a map showing the employment exchanges in a county and the number signing on in each)
• Links to other data - when you click on an area in the map, a new page is opened up with full details of the data used to generate the percentage

These are typical for the functionality available in Business Intelligence products. There are lots more!

If you would like any more information on this demo, Ammap maps and charts or business intelligence tools generally, please get in touch with me here.

If you have any comments on the demo or suggestions for alternative data to model, please pass them on.

Source of the idea for this demo

I got the idea for this from a version on US unemployment numbers that you can see here. The US version was brought to my attention when reading a tweet from Chris Horn (http://twitter.com/chrisjhorn) to Mark Little (http://twitter.com/marklittlenews) on the day of the Irish budget.

Google Analytics now has support for Annotations

Analyse your data for new cost-cutting or sales opportunitues

An article in Business Week discusses how a chain of restaurants is using Business Intelligence to better understand "consumer spending patterns to make a host of decisions, from altering staff levels to moving around menu items".

The article is entitled "Business Intelligence Software's Time Is Now" and you can access it here. It quotes John Van Decker, research vice-president at research firm Gartner - "There's a tremendous pressure on cost containment, on developing accurate forecasts of sales and expenses and trying to align the expense stream with projected revenue stream".

The restaurant business profiled has 1,700 outlets in 27 countries. These receive more than 1 million customers daily. They use Business Intelligence tools to sift through the data that these sales generate to help determine the "optimal staffing level during a particular shift at a particular restaurant".

A beverage company that is profiled used Business Intelligence software to help "tweak individual shipments to make sure they're carrying full loads". The BI software has turned what once was "30 hours of work into 30 minutes" and "the system has uncovered a great number of opportunities to cut costs that likely would have gone unnoticed before".

A number of other uses of BI software are profiled. Most of these are very large organisations that spend a huge amount on their BI software solutions.

However, smaller companies can implement a BI solution for a fraction of the costs outlined in the article. There are hundreds of BI software tools available, some of which are free.

You could be using these tools today to identify areas to cut costs, customers to whom you can sell more goods or services and new products to sell that you may not have conceived of before.

Call us for more information.