Create interactive magazine-style BI reports with Roambi’s new Flow

Roambi, creator of Roambi Analytics, has released a new, cloud-based product designed to put visualizations of business information in the hands of mobile and tablet users: Roambi Flow. More than a collection of interactive data displays, Flow begins with a series of magazine or report style templates which allow the user to create documents that can combine text, images, video and Roambi’s own interactive data display visualizations. The documents are then published and organized for viewing as free-standing editions through the Roambi Flow app, allowing the reader to flip through pages, drill down through the visualizations, or pop up video or images embedded on the pages.

Flow documents can be built from PDFs as well, using the PDF as the starting structure, adding new content into the Flow document once the PDF has been imported. The import, however is one-directional, as once the document has been converted, the functionality of interactivity using Roambi’s gesture-based navigation cannot be exported out of Flow.

Flow documents can also be shared and displayed in real time with other Flow users not only for them to read at their own pace but also in a “presentation mode,” making it possible to allow a presenter to walk others through a document, adding highlighting and annotation, and turning the pages for the viewers, rather than showing the next slide as  in a Powerpoint presentation, all under the presenter’s control.

Flow is the latest addition to Roambi’s suite of applications, all intended to work on handheld/mobile/tablet platforms, although the creation of content is built from within in their cloud app and would most likely be done on a laptop or desktop computer.

Quinton Alsbury, Co-founder/President of Product Innovation, Roambi

I had an opportunity to meet with Quinton Alsbury, a Co-Founder and the President of Product Innovation at Roambi, just days before the product’s release on Wednesday, and over lunch not only did he explain the company’s philosophy of dedicating all of their product development and research for the hand-held, gesture-based device market, but he gave me an impromptu tour of Flow, first showing me how the reader interacts with a document, and then a behind-the-scenes demonstration of creating a Flow document in the cloud.

Please watch the video below of my tour of Roambi’s Flow, and, as often happens with an in-the-field interview, you’ll notice some restaurant background noise and handheld camera motion. Taking that into account, it’s interesting to see how far we’ve come from simple word processing with cut-and-paste charts to fully interactive documents you can create anywhere through the cloud.

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