Cyfe

A new service called Cyfe is currently in beta and promises to become your web-based all-in-one business dashboard. It allows to arrange various widgets on a dashboard. The system offers a range of pre-build connections such as

• Salesforce
• Google Adsense, GMail, Analytics and Webmaster Central
• Freshbooks, Zendesk
• Twitter, Facebook
• MailChimp
• WordPress
• RSS

In addition it offers to include custom data sources which can be visualised as line, pie, area and column charts as well as images or HTML.Data can be passed by CSV files which can be pulled from a private URL. In this case it is possible to set an intervall for refreshing the data. A sample dashboard looks like this:

I tried a few widgets on my own and was up and running very quickly. As the charts are not implemented in Flash, they are easily accessible via iPhone and iPad.

A free account gives you 5 widgets per dashboard, while 20 widgets will set you back 9 USD and 100 widgets go for 49 USD per month. I do not quite understand this pricing strategy as I would normally just create several dashboards (as these are unlimited) in order to avoid payment. But maybe that is just me.

I like the idea and the numerous pre-configured widgets. However, in order to get dynamic data from internal databases into this service the average company will require some external coding support.