"Ich bin ein Berliner"

«Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was "civis Romanus sum". Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner". All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner"».

These words, spoken 47 years ago by John Fitzgerald Kennedy (read the full speech here), placed Berlin at the center of the world stage (watch the video).

Since June of last year, me and my team have been working practically nonstop to develop the program for the conference that Teradata has chosen to stage in Berlin in less than two months time. A complex project and an excellent multidisciplinary workshop that encompasses a wide range of topics, from team building to international relations, from communication and sales to project management and the income statement... An organic and multipurpose business case that leaves you sleepless as you take it forward, but which we are all very excited about, just like the city chosen for its venue. Berlin! What a unique city… which 20 years ago was once again at the centre of the world stage as the Berlin Wall finally came tumbling down. What seemed an impossible feat when I was 20… but which finally happened when I turned 21!

Unforeseeable? With hindsight perhaps not, it would’ve been enough to transform the data available at that time into information and then it would have been really possible to make more accurate forecasts. Just like the companies who use Teradata to better understand and more accurately serve their clients. Let’s take an example from among the globe’s major airline companies -  Lufthansa, Air France, British Airways, Alitalia, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines – which all use Teradata solutions for their business intelligence operations. Successfully analyzing critical moments as these arise and enabling their frontline operators to resolve problems and give the client concrete responses. The job of dealing with delays and changes in flight bookings has greatly accelerated in pace and logistic and operational issues now can be resolved almost instantly.

Many of these airlines are sending their delegates to Berlin to listen, but also to share their experiences. Such as Dr. Wolfgang Schwegle, Lufthansa’s Senior Manager Corporate Data Warehouse, who will present his work The BI-Cockpit of Lufthansa Passage Airlines - There's no better way to make decisions and explain how BI-Cockpit enables more than 1000 Lufthansa staff across the world to access fresh data and so optimize their service to the customer as well as their marketing activities, sales, and operating processes.

Companies from a whole spectrum of industries will be coming to our Berlin event, including famous brands such as Metro, DHL, Carrefour, Nokia, Telefonica, to reap the rewards of an extraordinary opportunity for comparison and enrichment.

But also keynote speakers from the international arena, but on that I’ll give you more details later…

Stay tuned!

Overtaken

It’s finally happened.
Readers of The Huffington Post website now outnumber (by a lot) the readers of The Washington Post.
Well, no big deal you might think, just another battle between publishers, if it weren’t for the fact that The Huffington Post is a blog, created and managed by Arianna Huffington.
In the past year, the Huffington blog has increased its reader population 26% to the dizzy figure of 9.4 million single readers, while that same period saw the number of The Washington Post readers plunge 29% to 9.2 million.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Inevitably.
Convergence is everywhere. It has never been so easy to reach such a vast audience, the problem is interacting with the audience you’ve captured.
And this is the change on which everything hinges, because it has an impact on the way people behave. (People meaning us, me who’s writing, you who’s reading, who wants to voice your thoughts and get some feedback, who wants to be treated as a person and as a client…).
Some data to highlight the trend underway:
- In America, the reader count of printed daily newspapers has plummeted more than 7 million, while the number of online blog readers has swelled to 30 million.
- In the past two months, the number of videos uploaded to You Tube surpassed the total number of program hours broadcast by American TV stations 7 days a week since 1948!
- About 10 million people visit the American information websites each month, while Facebook, My Space, and You Tube attract roughly 250 million visitors.
- Six years ago not even one of the three social networks just listed existed.
Now that’s what I call an uptrend!

All chubby and super-nourished

This time it’s information I’m talking about though, not food.
American households are exposed to 34 Gigabytes of data and information.
Each year?
No, each day!
It’s the result of research by the University of California, San Diego on how Americans behave in front of the computer, TV, radio, cell phone, and videogame console.
But the risk of indigestion is high, almost unavoidable in fact. It means digesting 100,000 words every day, a quarter of those contained in the tome War and Peace by Tolstoy.
According to San Diego University estimates, American households consumed 3.6 zettabytes of data and information in 2008.
A monstrous amount, when you compare it with the fact that the biggest commercial data warehouses in the world have a storage capacity of slightly more than a petabyte*.
So what are the potential remedies? Like food, to consume less. To use the medium in an appropriate way, to use correct form and to not disabuse it. Easy to say, not so very easy to do.
* Units of Information:
1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes
1 Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes
1 Exabyte = 1000 Petabytes
1 Zettabyte = 1000 Exabyte