Web 2.0 Style Data Visualizer – Widgenie

I recently received an email from an employee from a business intelligence company called LogiXML. She asked if I could write a review for LogiXML’s new SaaS (software as a service) product which is currently in beta, called ,Widgenie. I thought it would be interesting to check out something new and it was also the first time someone asked me to write a review on something since the start of this blog 20-something days ago, so it really meant a lot to me and its my honor to write this review.

First thing I noticed when I looked at the site, my impression was that its a very nice web 2.0 feel website with the use very vibrant colors, clean and organized layout. Page loading was quick for me, even for the movies in the multimedia section. I sort of have an idea of the product so I quickly signed up, the process was quick as well. I received a confirmation within a minute, once my account was activated, I logged in right away to give it a test drive.

The interface is extremely easy to use I am sure anyone that knows how to surf the internet can use it right off the bat. You just have to follow the steps and you can create your own widget in no time. Keep in mind though these widgets are good for display statistics by uploading your own Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets and/or CSV files. Once you have uploaded one or some of your own data files, you can create 6 different widgets such as tabular, animated line chart, animated bar chart, animated area chart, animated pie chart and text cloud widget. Hope there will be more to choose from in the future. Once you have picked a widget type, the next step is interactive drag and drop your elements from your data files into say for example, the y axis or the x axis of an animated bar chart. The program gives you control over which element goes into which field.

Again the whole process is intuitive and I won’t go further into how to setup a widget.

Once you are done customizing your widget, you can then publish it by choosing from the 5 given types:
embedding into your site directly, like I have here
as a simple link
embed into iGoogle
embed into Facebook
or embed into Blogger

And finally here is my test widget end product:

Finally, the Widgenie also provides statistics of how many views, number of unique visitors and from what sites which is a very good addition to tracking which of your widgets people are mostly interested in.

I’m sure I havn’t covered every aspect of Widgenie but this should give you an idea of what it is capable of, I think this program is particularly useful for people that deals with a lot of statistical data, such as number of visitors, number of site views and the time spent on the site etc. Instead of looking at boring text and numbers on an Excel spreadsheet, Widgenie will display them in a more interactive and engaging way.