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SAP announced today that several of its enterprise products will soon gain new features for visualizing location data from Google Maps. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and Streamwork were specifically mentioned. SAP expects these features to be available in both on-premise and hosted versions of its applications.

Continuing our focus on business apps for the iPad, today we look at tools for visualizing data and information. The iPad's interface begs to be used for manipulating visual information, and it certainly delivers. And if you're used to creating charts and diagrams at your desk with Microsoft Excel or Visio, these five apps will deliver comparable tools that you can use from anywhere.

Revolution Analytics is a company that provides commercial support for the open source statistical programming language R. Its flagship product is Revolution R for Enterprise, a distribution of R that competes with other commercial statistical products such as SAS and SPSS. Revolution CEO Norman H. Nie was the co-inventor of SPSS.

Gartner predicts that by 2013, 33% of business intelligence functionality will be consumed on mobile devices. And it seems that these sort of forecasts are usually over-aggressive, our commenters seem to agree that Gartner's forecast is a bit too modest. BI going mobile quickly, and tablets are leading that movement.

Here are 10 BI apps that support the iPad right now. Some are existing BI products with iPad native apps, some are Web-based BI applications with iPad support and some are clients that can connect to your existing BI solutions.

The question I always come back to when I hear the term Enterprise 2.0 is one that I think my buddy Dennis Howlett would ask. I mean, who gives a flying trombone? That's not really how Dennis would say it. I will let him express himself in his own words about why anyone in their right mind would pay for anything with a high price tag that has a big fat social label on it.

Here's what gets me. We get so wrapped up about collaboration concepts and the nuances of social. In this upside down world, social is a term that is more commonly use to describe enterprise architecture than it is about sharing a beer with your mates.

Data visualization is a medium for understanding information that had previously been the domain of scientists and researchers.

Today, due to the amount of data available, there is an increasing need to find new ways of understanding what information means that is available through social networks and throughout the Web.

Engaging Online Communities is a report we published this week that explores ways to engage with customers. It looks at the tools available to engage, collect and analyze information.

Impure is a new programming language designed to give non-programmers access to professional tools for data visualization. Users can use it to process and display data from social media feeds, financial information and more. Unlike Processing, a simple programming language for data visualization and art, Impure is a completely visual language - there's no need to learn any code. The programming language is also completely web hosted - there is no development environment to install. It's sort of like Yahoo! Pipes but for visualization.