Last week’s popular fantasy football post got us thinking about an older post and other non-traditional uses of BI. When this blog launched two years ago, we looked at five unconventional uses of BI software. For those who wish to travel back in time, here’s the video:
In the spirit of that original post, here are five more unconventional ways BI software can help you gain insight.
5. Focus on Personal Fitness
Counting calories eaten or miles jogged is nothing new. But with powerful mobile analytics tools at your fingertips you can now play with that data in ways that would have been impossible a few years ago. Compare your routines and results from day to day, week to week, or month to month. Look inside the data – for example, what happens to your weight and eating patterns during and after a one-week vacation?
4. Organize Your Community
Who you vote for is your own business, but whether you voted in the last election, and where, are matters of public record. A wealth of information about the electorate in your city or district is now available as searchable databases. In most jurisdictions this data includes not just who votes in an election, but party registration. Other public databases record political contributions, while census data provides neighborhood-by-neighborhood demographics. With powerful BI software available on your desktop or laptop, “political machines” are not just for the powerful any more.
3. Plan Your Dream Vacation
Geolocation data… it sounds like a mouthful, but more and more information about places around the country and the world is now in searchable databases. How often does it rain in Paris in the springtime? Find out, and compare to Edinburgh or Madrid. And geolocation data isn’t limited to entire cities any more. Neighborhood-by-neighborhood – even block by block – such location data, from traffic to crime rates, is now available for many cities around the world.
2. Win the Lottery
Did you know that data analytics can help you win the lottery? That’s what happened to elderly Massachusetts couple Marjorie and Gerald Selbee. They developed a method for winning the lottery based on analytics and loopholes. According to a report in the Boston Globe, the Selbees’ company GS Investment Strategies games the system.
1. Give Your Team a Competitive Advantage
We’re seeing the application of analytics more and more in sports. For instance, earlier this year, we showed how TIBCO Founder and CEO Vivek Ranadive used our analytics solution to coach his daughter’s basketball team to a championship season, even though he’s never played the game. We’ve also highlighted John Ezekowitz (@JohnEzekowitz), a Harvard sophomore and Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective co-president. And next month, the Spotfire blogging team will be posting a “Moneyball” blog post to coincide with the debut of the movie about how quantitative data-driven analysis enabled a cash-strapped MLB team to compete and win. Subscribe to our blog to receive this post in your inbox. In the meantime, check out the movie’s trailer below.
