My Favourite Tipples from a growth market expert
Jinfo Blog

By Pete Read

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Pete Read, CEO of Global Growth Markets, a business research and advisory firm specialising in emerging markets. He shares his favourite online go-to resources for rapid access to key information.

Item

"Information overload" and "drowning in information" are concepts which will be familiar to anyone involved in the information industry. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of sources are now available on almost any business topic you care to enter into an online search engine. And while search engines sort and recommend sources for us every time we search, as a research consultant often needing to get up to speed on a new topic rapidly, I find it useful to keep a few go-to bookmarks at the ready.

• Gapminder: Brainchild of the late, great statistician and self-styled "edutainer" Hans Rosling - who I once had the privilege and pleasure of meeting - Gapminder hosts an excellent collection of demographic, economic and epidemiology statistics, delivered for free either in flat data files or via Gapminder's open-source software which includes the famous animated bubble charts Hans used to great effect in his TED talks on his "Fact-Based World View".

• Frontier Strategy Group blog: FSG has been monitoring and analysing emerging markets for over 10 years and in my view is the best at what they do. They employ a group of analysts who specialise in different countries and regions who blog regularly on interesting emerging market business topics ranging from eCommerce to channel strategies to political risk.

• 10 Times: Trade shows are a great way to get to know an industry sector - all the key players gathered in one place, latest products or services on display, hot topics featured on the agenda and industry gurus giving keynotes. And you don't even have to attend them to benefit. 10 Times is a pretty comprehensive listing of trade shows the world over. And while it doesn't always have the details on every event, it does provide links to their own websites.

• Knoema: Surprisingly wide and deep in terms of data coverage, Knoema is a valuable font of global time series statistics with a useful interactive graphical interface. Whether you need to know how much fruit is grown in Finland, or the level of investment in telecom in Taiwan, Knoema probably has something useful for you. 

An article in Jinfo which I found particularly interesting:

• A huge amount of time, effort and budget goes into outsourcing to vendors, and the opportunity cost if you get it wrong can be enormous. In extreme cases it can even cost you your job or your next promotion. As the recent Jinfo article "Jinfo research on benchmarking information services (vendor relations)" says, "Communicate early and often with vendors... the biggest assets you can have on hand are your vendor scorecards... learn your vendor's marketplace... determine where and how you should be spending your company's research funds."

Contribute your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the Jinfo audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@jinfo.com or visit the Publish with Jinfo page.

« Blog