Roambi Flow Helps Turn Raw Data Into Beautiful Contextual Reports

When we last covered Roambi I told you about the latest release of Roambi Analytics, a stunning app that helps companies visual all different kinds of data.  The newly redesigned Analytics app for iOS 7 has been very well received according to Roambi co-founder Quinton Alsbury.  But today isn’t about Roambi Analytics, today, the company is officially launching a new app called Roambi Flow.  While Roambi’s analytics app does an excellent job displaying the hard data, Flow gets into the “why” behind the data.

Hard numbers are a great, but many times you need to hand over the hard data to someone else and if they aren’t as involved with the numbers as you are they will want to see some explanations about what they are looking at.  And that is exactly where Roambi Flow comes in.

Flow is a publishing tool that is deeply integrated with Analytics, it lets you use editorial analysis to tell the whole story behind the data. Flow is designed to be extremely easy to use, but just as powerful as top notch design programs like Adobe InDesign.  When I sat down with Mr. Alsbury late last week he ran me through the design process and I was impressed. Having some experience with Adobe InDesign myself, I can say that Flow looks to be a pleasure to work in. It offers several different page templates and several block elements that can be easily modified with just a few clicks.  And perhaps best of all everything created in Flow can be exported into a beautiful report that looks great on an iPad.

Because Flow is deeply integrated with Analytics, you can have your Flow report pull data directly from your analytics and even preset a certain dataset as the main one, so when you send the report to someone they will see the dataset you want to focus on first. Another nifty feature in Roambi Flow is the ability to lock the presentation while presenting and even beam the presentation from one device to another seamlessly. If you lock the presentation that means people can’t jump ahead of you, which can be annoying.  If you didn’t lock your presentation and notice people flipping around your report, you can lock it and then those people will be automatically “flipped back” to the page of the report you are currently on.  Pretty slick, right?

Roambi Flow can also work with existing PDFs and turn them into living documents, simply import them into Flow and you will have multi-touch gestures, pages that can be flipped through (as opposed to scrolled through), and even the ability to support rich media content.

If one thing is clear to me after getting a look at Roambi Flow it’s that the company has really thought through various different aspects of creating and presenting reports with data. And because they realize how intertwined data and presentation/reporting are, they are bundling Flow with every Analytics subscription at no extra charge.  Starting today, if you have Roambi Analytics subscription when you login to the control panel, you will see Roambi Flow as well.

Roambi has been testing out Flow with select partners for a while now with success.  For example, Ogilvy (the marketing/PR firm) has been using Analytics and Flow to make reports for their clients to give them a complete 360 overview of their ad spend in a monthly report.

You can download Roambi Flow today from the App Store.