Keboola Stats on Pebble

by Petr Šimeček

BI at your fingertips


In 2014 it’s already passe to have your dashboard behind two firewalls and two-factor authorization, full of information with various levels of importance. What our customers need in today’s fast world is literally have the most critical information at their fingertips - and not even an iPad dashboard can fulfill this promise with the expected level of convenience.

Why?

We believe that everyone of us, regardless of job or interest, has their ONE number. The one number that captures the essence of what you really do. For instance, as a salesperson you may be very easily motivated if you see what you will make on commissions and how you compare to the rest of the team. The CEO needs one number from the CFO… this immediate feedback loop is crucial for understanding and connecting actions and outcomes. Alternately, if you’re blogger, the number of followers and/or comments is what gets you out of the bed and to the keyboard each day.

In the time it takes you to reach for your iPad, another event in your business has taken place.  … And now the only thing you need to do is look at your watch.


There’s pretty short distance from your fingertips to your wrist, making the smartwatch an obvious choice. We choose the pioneer, Pebble, as our jumping point into the “wearables” movement.

Using Pebble, Keboola Stats connects with your data to deliver business insights on the go. With a delivery speed of up to 1x/10 second, we’re serious when we say “real time updates”.

How does it work?

Simple. Just three easy steps:

  1. If you don’t have it already … install the Pebble app into your phone (Android, iOS)

  2. Into that, you will install the Keboola Stats app.

  3. Finally, enter the token generated by our “Pebble Writer.”

… Oh, and it does help to have the Pebble watch.


Ok, show me what can I do ...

Keboola Stats can show you a dashboard with your top 2 numbers and their % changes in real time. So, what if you wanted to see your actual revenue from midnight (until now) and see the % change compared to (the same point in time) yesterday? Or how about today’s order count and it’s % change from the beginning of the week?

You can answer these questions in a matter of seconds, putting you ahead of the game and making you a rockstar in your next morning meeting. A glance on your ONE number tells you what you need to do next - be it nothing, or be it looking at in detail what changed the number.

But that’s only one example. Pretty much anything that fits on the screen and derived from your data can be delivered there. We now have 33 data sources + an API ready to accept any type of data from our clients - we routinely process everything from social data to POS transactions to support tickets.

So what’s next?

We have the full stack on back end - data collection, analyses and API. Now we’re ready to roll it out to LG, Samsung and Motorola :)

If you’re as psyched about this as we are, you can thank Tomas Kacur for making it all happen. Oh and Martin Karasek for snapping out the Pebble Store icons in record time - something like 45sec ? :)

If you already have your data in our care, tell us the numbers you want to see and we’re pretty much done. We will agree with you on the frequency of updates depending on the context (no point in frequently updating a number that in its nature changes slowly).

If you’re new to our services, let us know and let’s talk about how to get to your data in the most sensible way. GoodData clients have an advantage because we can connect directly to a report within the platform.

P.S.  For the tech savvy, the phone Pebble app (JS) and the app for your watch (Vanilla C) are published as an OpenSource. You can get it from our GitHub (backend API is in Apiary.io.).