The Economist and Title inflation

Who knew that the roles of CEO, CFO and COO were old in nature by relatively new in terms of titles? Who knew that the first CEO title came from the Standard Oil Trust conglomerate? Well Peter Cappelli from Wharton did. Great 12 min podcast from the Economist called "What's in a name" (embedded below) on the history of titles and the resulting 'title inflation.

Economist: Data, too much information and the Yottabyte

I have been saying for three years now that the biggest challenge we have to face in the online travel industry is "too much information". Now, thanks to the Economist, we can actually start to see how much is too much.

Once or twice a month the Economist publishes a special report on a country or subject. A few weeks back they published Data, data everywhere, a supplement devoted to the amount of information and data swirling around us. Let me jump straight to an extract from the punchline to the article

"According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes. Merely keeping up with this flood, and storing the bits that might be useful, is difficult enough. Analysing it, to spot patterns and extract useful information, is harder still."

Not all of this is online but according to Cisco, by 2013 667 exabytes of data will be flowing over the internet.

To put an exabyte into context, to store 1 exabyte of data would take 15.6million top of the range 64GB iPads. I struggle to think how we can capture, digest, store, manage, secure, use and more that amount of data.

The Economist gave three interesting snapshots of companies trying to deal with this amount of data:

• Facebook: currently storing more than 40 billion photos;
• Wal-Mart: processing 1 million transactions per hour; and
  
• Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP: have spent more than $156billion on buying software firms specialising in data management and analytics.

The official definition of information is data processed in timely, relevant and accurate form. An IBM survey reported by the Economist found that half of the managers quizzed did not trust the information they had to base decisions on. We have more data than we know what to do with but don't trust it to help us come to the right outcome. The data flood's first consequence is to stifle our ability to turn data into information.

From all this it is clear that we need to learn some new words. Screw the giga, tera, peta and even exabyte. Time to introduce you to the Zettabyte (2 to the 70 bytes or a 1000 exabytes) and the Yottabyte (2 to the 80 bytes or 1000 Zettabyte). Though you will not need to worry about the Yotta just yet. Even the Economist admits that the Yotta is currently not just too much information but "too big to imagine".

The Data special report is a great read - check it out.

PS if you want to read more about what exciting things I think we should be doing with data, check out my series of posts on my concept of EveryYou.

thanks to J.Kleyn for the photo via flickr

Guidebook Economist Style: Doing business in Sydney

The Economist is a regular podcast listen of mine. This week "Doing Business in Sydney" by the Economist appeared in my iTunes podcast feed. Is a ten minute Sydney guide by the Economist (odeo player with audio below) covering airport practicalities, business culture, restaurant and hotel recommendations and side trips if you have a moment. Interesting that the Economist is getting into the very crowded guidebook space. As to the content itself as a Sydney native I agreed with most of the recommendations except the comments on the airport.

Comments like

1. "by and large waiting times at immigration are not that onerous"; and
2. '"usually no wait for taxi's" [at the airport].

....are scandalous untruths. A business or leisure traveller to Sydney can be practically 100% guaranteed of great weather, amazing views, entertaining people and a relaxed but serious business environment. Hopefully all that will be enough to help the traveller recover from the endless queues, scans and form checkers of Sydney Airport Immigration, Customs and Quarantine and the most inefficient taxi rank system this side of the sub-continent.

The Airline Industry - Economist Style

Interesting little podcast here from the Economist speaking to Paul Markillie the author of their recent report on the aviation industry.

Couple of points from the interview

• On the whole the industry is carrying $200 billion dollars in debt;
• It was a fantastic year for turnover with more than $473 billion in revenues however this generated only a a profit of $5billion for a net margin <1%;
• Continues the hype build up on the Beoing Dreamliner on fuel efficiency and the supposed increased consumer comfort from the carbon fibre hull;
• Asian aviation market will be bigger than US domestic by 2010; and
  
• The airline industry is unique in that it is a mature industry but no one carrier owns more than a few percentage points of the market. This is of course caused by the the obsession of nations to restrict ownership and consolidation. As Markville notes

"as the result you have an industry that brought the world globalisation but has been unable to globalise".

What a staggering industry. Such a critical part of the model world, employs so many people, pays such high salaries for executives and generates so much for the media industry through advertising revenues, yet is such an inefficient and poorly structured industry.

Worth eight and half minutes of your time if you enjoy tracking the airline industry