Wow - where to start. We have been developing and innovating like mad since the last official release of QVSource. Many of our most active users have already been involved in testing and pushing more recent releases and we are looking into ways to give everyone access to the 'nightly builds' as the less frequent official releases are not really doing the product justice!

Here is a list of the most significant updates in the latest release. If you would like to try QVSource you can sign up for free trial via our website. If you have already done so but your licence has expired please email us back and we will get you an extension!

New Connectors

We have added three new connectors to QVSource.

• Perhaps the most significant is the Twingly Connector, allowing you to load structured results into your QlikView application from 53 million blogs (that's million!). Twingly have been fantastic to work with and have even helped structure a special QVSource pricing model which we think is great value and will work for our users (you will need to contact them for more information and you will find the link in the connector).
• We have also added a PeerIndex Connector, this is comparable to Klout and allows you to load data on the audience, authority, activity and topics for Twitter users loaded into your QlikView application.
• Last but certainly not least we now offer a bitly Connector which allows you to load analytics data from bitly shortened url (including clicks, referrers and countries).

General Fixes

There have been a large number of updates to many of the connectors and the QVSource core itself - we strongly recommend upgrading. Some notable points:

• The Google Analytics Connector has been given a huge performance boost. Please upgrade!
• The OData Connector now supports windows authentication meaning it can now be used to load data from Sharepoint 2012.
• Sometimes scripts generated contained the : character which it seems QlikView 11 doesn't like. This is now fixed (we just replace is with an _ )
• You can now change the port number in the settings UI and also diasble the shut down message (which let's face it, gets annoying after the first time).
• Fixed issue where connector entries were sometimes repeated in main list.
• The Facebook Fan Pages Connector has a new TaggedForItem table which will list the places where a certain Facebook object (e.g. Fan Page) was tagged.
• The Twitter Connector has some new tables and bug fixes. Please see the change log for more details.

We would recommend that to get a full overview you read the change log in the main UI and also in each connector you are using. These are also available on the wiki.

Demo Apps

We have a brand new demo application for YouTube as well as some updates to our main Facebook (v 1.7) and Twitter (v 2.6) demo applications - we recommend all users to start using these latest versions.

Enterprise Features

Connectors now advertise which end points (urls) they need to connect to (see the Advanced tab on each connector) so that you can configure your outgoing firewall or proxy to allow QVSource to access just what it needs. We have also added instructions on how to configure QVSource to run under a standard user account with minimal permissions to give you confidence that QVSource is safe to run on your enterprise server.

New Website & Case Studies

We gave our website a facelift yesterday and added some new content. Most interestingly we have three new case studies - see why Peto, the Overseas Development Institute and Unipetech chose QVSource!

Win With Your Support

Your support and recommendations of QVSource are key to our success (we don't have a big marketing budget!), so if you've been using QVSource and like it, why not tell the world? We'd love to reach 100 recommendations on our LinkedIn product page by the end of February. And, if we do, we are going to randomly pick someone from all the recommendations and give them a free licence of QVSource Desktop Edition along with Twitter, Facebook Fanpages, Facebook Insights, YouTube and Google Analytics connectors!

We have some even more exciting connectors in store. Stay tuned and thanks for your support.

Just been 'eating our own dog food', as we do a lot with QVSource. And here are the results:

I'm not suggesting it's necessarily a good idea to load your QlikView application with data from this many sources (although it can make sense) but we were very pleased with how easy it was to create a meaningful dashboard from 9 of the 30 or so different Web APIs which QVSource can connect to.

In this dashboard we are visualising a number of things:

• Tweets/Retweets mentioning QVSource plus Tweets from the QVSource account itself [using the QVSource Twitter Connector].
• Likes of our main Facebook Fan page as well as of the Like button on our main website [using the QVSource Facebook Insights Connector].
• Sentiment of the Tweets [using the QVSource Sentiment Analyser Connector].
• Signups to QVSource [using the QVSource Google Spreadsheets Connector].
• Website Visitors [using the QVSource Google Analytics Connector].
• Blog Posts mentioning the word 'QVSource' [using the QVSource Twingly Connector].
• Key Tweeters [using both the QVSource Klout & PeerIndex Connectors].

A few notes about the dashboard.

• The MonthEx dimension is a month since March 2011 which is about when we started discussing QVSource publicly and allowing beta sign ups.
• You will notice the Fan Page Likes line only starts in about October 2011 - This is because it's not possible to get Facebook Insights data on a Fan Page until you have at least 30 likes.
• The Tweets only go back about a week. This is because the Twitter search API only goes back up to a week or 1500 Tweets. Normally we would recommend running daily or hourly reloads of this data and saving the results away to a QVD file.
• In the data model we also have data about posts on our Facebook Fan Page [using the QVSource Facebook Fan Page Connector] which we aren't yet showing in the dashboard.
• It uses our new Twingly connector which can search for structured data from over 53 million blogs!

This dashboad includes data from 9 Web APIs and took a couple of hours to build using QVSource. I think I could have easily carried on adding useful data from quite a few other sources. In particular MailChimp (which we use to manage our newsletters) provides a whole set of additional data.

If you would like to see how easily you can enhance your QlikView applications with other data sources you can sign up for a free evaluation of QVSource here:
http://www.qvsource.com/

UPDATE (6th February 2012) - I have just posted this demo app with some notes on our QVSource wiki.