The CIA World Factbook is a data nerd’s dream and a crowning achievement in data gathering, highlighting every single country in the world, and presenting myriad facts ranging from GDP to important local industries. It’s also mind-numbingly boring and not terribly useful because there’s simply no way to summarize all that data.
IBM’s data-visualisation researchers leveled their resources at the problem, producing their own World Factbook, a sprawling online tool that lets you create thousands of charts on the fly.
For a similar–and even more ambitious–project, definitely check out the World Development Indicators 2010, which contains details about health, environment, and education of every country in the world.
In case you weren’t one of the 700 million-plus fans to watch the World Cup Finals yesterday, Spain beat the Netherlands 1-0 in extra time. But the España football stars weren’t the only winners–and certainly the Holland footballers were not the only losers. Companies around the world were competing to increase brand awareness and boost profits–here’s FastCompany’s list of the winners and losers.
The World Competitiveness Yearbook 2010 from Swiss business school IMD finds the U.S. and Europe losing their edge to fast-growing Asian economies.
A lot can change in 12 months. At this time last year, Western nations dominated the annual ranking of the world’s most competitive countries prepared by the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Now, in the most recent ranking released May 19, five of the top 10 are from the Asia-Pacific region. Emerging-power China, ranked No. 18, has gained ground, even as No. 3-ranked U.S. and No. 22-ranked Britain slipped in the global pecking order. Check out the top 10 here.
Escaping to a private island is a childhood dream fed by stories such as Treasure Island and Swallows and Amazons. Surprisingly, many real islands are on the market, starting at well under £100,000 (€114,000). Here Times Money lists 10 affordable examples from around the world now on sale at Vladi Private Islands.
The Vancouver Olympics begin this Friday and will welcome some 2,500 athletes.
It’s true, they won’t be quite the design extravaganza that London 2012 will be–but there’s still going to be hundreds of millions of dollars in design on display, everywhere from the uniforms to the buildings to the branding. Fast Company provides a slideshow that gives an impression at the design elements you can expect to see flitting across your screen, in between shots of athletes.
Popular photo-sharing social network Flickr was launched back in February 2004 by a Vancouver-based company Ludicorp. It took one year for Yahoo to acquire Flickr, and among the company’s many acquisitions, Flickr definitely stands as one of the most successful.
Being six years old (nearly the same age as Facebook) makes Flickr almost an old guy on the Internet, as many other social networks (Bebo, hi5) have risen and fallen within that timespan. Although its traffic lately isn’t growing as it used to, it’s still doing well, with users sharing billions of photos there. We wish you a very happy birthday, Flickr!
From the rise of China to the rise of the U.S. federal debt, 2008 was a year of momentous money stories that will echo well into the future.
It was a year of historic change in business, economics, and finance. General Motors and Chrysler made whirlwind trips through the bankruptcy process, and the U.S. Senate narrowly voted in favor of health care reform in a dramatic vote on Christmas Eve morning, bringing President Obama just this close to achieving a top campaign priority.
In other times, any one of these sagas might have been an obvious and easy selection as the business story of the year. Yet 2009 was so full of drama that health care reform will have to settle for a position on the short list, and Chrysler might not have made the list at all if it hadn’t been paired with GM.
So here’s Portfolio.com’s take of the most important business, economics, and finance stories of the year, selected with an eye toward which ones had the biggest hand in shaping the world for now and for the foreseeable future.
DesignBoom listed some remarkable tube station designs from across the world.
It has collected nine outstanding examples. For example: Shanghai’s Bund Sightseeing tunnel, a 2,100-foot stretch of tunnel that connects The Bund–the city’s famous waterfront–with Pudong, it’s high-tech business district, which has sprung up from swampland in a mere 15 years.
Other master design works are the stations in Stockholm’s subway system, designed by Per Olof Ultvedt in 1975. There are literally hundreds of art installations, strewn throughout the city’ 100 stations. As DesignBoom points out, many take advantage of the natural rock faces found through the tunnels, which give the entire thing a primordial feel unparalleled in the world
The CIA World Factbook is a data nerd’s dream and a crowning achievement in data gathering, highlighting every single country in the world, and presenting myriad facts ranging from GDP to important local industries. It’s also mind-numbingly boring and not terribly useful because there’s simply no way to summarize all that data.
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