Whether you are caught up in watching the 2008 Olympics or not, it is a welcome relief to have something else on the front pages of the (US) newspapers other than the presidential elections or the latest war, i.e. Georgia/Russia. If you are interested you are probably watching particular athletes or sports and checking out results at Sports Illustrated, ESPN or the official Olympic site.

You have an alternate to the classic media sites created by iDashboards a business intelligence company. As a way to demonstrate their dashboard capabilities iDashboards has created an Olympic Dashboard (http://live.idashboards.com/beijing2008/?guestuser=guest) for the 2008 Olympics. The dashboard tracks the results for all countries across 28 sports. The dashboard illustrates graphic capabilities such as bar charts, speedometers, gauges, interactive country flags, and medals.

If you are interested in the 2008 Olympics or if you want to look at dashboard capabilities check it out. It might be an interesting way for IT to show business people what all this business intelligence and dashboards is about.

fyi: I do not write about press releases (PR) passing it off as news nor do I pass on sales pitches sent to me from marketing/PR people from many software companies. In this case, however, I appreciate the guerilla marketing effort and think it is a great way to demonstrate what one can do with dashboards.