Have a look at this TIME article. The headline is "Americans Are Eating Fewer Calories, So Why Are We Still Obese?".

It goes on to cite two studies. One study shows that old people eat less fast food then young adults, and that in general food consumption is declining. This comes from the aging population I guess. The other shows a small decline (about 7%) in the calorie consumption of children. 

Neither study showed a decrease in calorie consumption by adult Americans, as far as I can tell. The naive assumption would be that consuming fewer calories would result in less obesity, but no data on the topic is presented. The headline is a complete misdirection.

The moral of the story is you should limit your observations to what the data actually says.

Analysts like to provide a list of predictions for the coming year. I've never been a big fan because I think that real tipping points are pretty rare in any industry. People tend to overestimate the short-term change and underestimate long-term change.

Have a look at this TIME article. The headline is "Americans Are Eating Fewer Calories, So Why Are We Still Obese?".

It goes on to cite two studies. One study shows that old people eat less fast food then young adults, and that in general food food consumption is declining. This comes from the aging population I guess. The other shows a small decline (about 7%) in the calorie consumption of children. 

Neither study showed a decrease in calorie consumption by adult Americans, as far as I can tell. The naive assumption would be that consuming fewer calories would result in less obesity, but no data on the topic is presented. The headline is a complete misdirection.

The moral of the story is you should limit your observations to what the data actually says.

Christmas shopping this year really drove home to me how completely the electronics industry has made itself obsolete in recent years. The electronics stores are emptying out. All the gadgets that have been so popular in recent decades -- cameras, camcorders, VCRs, tape recorders, CD players, portable music boxes, dictation machines, game consoles, pagers, PCs, notebook computers, TVs, radios, pocket calculators, GPS navigation devices, synthesizers, mixing consoles and of course telephones (mobile and land based) have all disappeared into smart phones.

But smart phones aren't really phones at all, they are just palmtop computers that include an interface for cellular networks and a phone app. They are called smart phones for marketing reasons -- because the phone companies use them to lock consumers into overpriced network contracts. If photography were the killer app, they would be called smart cameras, which is just as appropriate. The only thing that seems to be keeping the entire electronics industry from being swallowed up by the black hole of Moore's Law is this kind of marketing wheeze and the (rapidly falling) price of screens.

I'm old enough to remember when Radio Shack was a national treasure. Now it's just a place to buy batteries while being harassed by a hard selling salesman from some telecoms oligopolist best known for hating its customers. And in this age of smart hearing aids, robotic assembly lines and fly-by-wire airplanes, its not just consumer electronics that is being computerized.

There is a discussion of some remarks I made to Ann All at IT Business Edge here, together with some opnions by Howard Dresner.

The interview reflects my opinion pretty well. I see mobile BI as a way to find new types of customers for BI more than as a way to replace existing installations. Too bad I didn't mention salespeople on the road, I think they are an important potential market as well.

Another point is that I think most people who said they expected mobile BI to be in use within 12 months were being too optimistic. The BI Survey 11 will address this question.

I'm talking to Tibco about Spotfire. It's an interesting product that I've reviewed before. It seems to me that they are moving more and more into operative BI, which fits the Tibco idea of fast data delivery that fits Tibco very well. They also seems to be putting more emphasis on ROLAP than they used to.

What is interesting is that they are also presenting a social media tool called Tibbr (wonder how they came up with that name!) and a cloud version. There's nothing wrong with this of course, but it seems to me that it doesn't fit their bus and/or ROLAP approach very well.

Their justification for the investment is that some analyst or other is predicting fast growth in this area. This reminds me of what an important ole analysts play in the market. Thanks to the analysts, a lot of BI vendors are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, even though the cloud sales channel is very different from what most BI vendors are accustomed to, and that the idea of mving data off site and then back onsite adds complexity.

I'm talking to QlikTech about their new version, coming soon. I'll be publishing the results in the BI Verdict. They are focusing more and more on these bigger accounts. I think this story fits pretty well in my informal series of posts on the subject of agile BI. By coincidence I have already discussed QlikView in a previous post.

QlikTech has a what they call a "land and expand" policy, which means getting a single department on the tool and expanding from there. Actually, all BI companies that can deliver departmental solutions have something similar. The reason for this is simple: The cost of sales for selling to a company that is already using the tool is much lower than for completely new customers. In fact, a lot of BI tools spread through companies from department to department this way.

Now QlikTech is concentrating more on enterprise accounts. So it's interesting to see that the company is moving away from the previous claim that the tool is a replacement for a data warehouse. I think that any attempt on their part to compete as an enterprise solution would just distract them from their end users.

A lot of BI companies go through a similar life cycle as they grow. Most start out as ways to create departmental solutions, which tend to be faster, more agile projects. As they get bigger management tends to concentrate on larger accounts, which means making sure they are acceptable to the IT department. But IT is more interested in keeping processes running than in agile development. As a result, the products tend to become more complex and less suitable to agile solutions.

This is a big issue for QlikView right now because they have grown so quickly in recent years. But currently the company seems to backing away from radical changes in the tool. But it applies to and BI tool that is growing.

One of the key ideas in agility is the importance of delivering real, testable results without delay. In fact, the Agile Manifesto recommends delivering working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months.

Delivery working software with two months may sound a bit extreme, but there is good evidence that short projects are more successful than long projects. In fact, our research in the BI Survey shows that the application should be rolled out to the users less than six months after the product has been selected. We have found the same result year after year in the ten year history of the Survey. Amazingly, project benefits start to fall as early as a month after the product is selected, and continue to fall thereafter. And of the many project parameters we study, none shows as clear an effect on project success as project length.

These results from the BI Survey provide clear empirical support for the idea of using agile methods in business intelligence projects. The results have remained also consistent since we started the Survey ten years ago, long before the idea of agile development or agile business intelligence became popular.

But why do short projects work so much better? Our research shows that the main problems that arise in longer projects are organizational, not technical. Needs change over the course of time, and end users lose interest in the project. Disagreements over the project goals arise. Lack of interest and disappointed end users are a major issue in business intelligence.

And needs certainly do change quickly in business intelligence. For example, another study we carried out shows that three quarters of European companies modify their planning processes one or more times a year. In an environment like this, a project that takes a year to implement is quite likely to be obsolete before it is finished. Even a six month wait can push potential users to look around for a more agile solution.

The problem this creates is that not all business intelligence projects can be carried out within a few months. This is especially true when major data management issues need to be addressed. The agile solution to this is to find way of splitting large projects into smaller ones. The usual argument against this approach is that it creates the risk of reducing efficiency in the long term. But the agile methodology is to measure success in terms of working software delivered in the short term, instead of attempting to meet nebulous long-term goals.

My blog is including on the Alltop business intelligence page, and at the time of writing I display their badge on the blog.

According to the site 'The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, ”What’s happening?”' Alltop is a 1990's style Web registry maintained by human editors.

But Alltop's business intelligence page has several problems that make it less useful than it could be. The page has fallen victim to a semantic Web style gotcha. Like many other phrases, business intelligence means different things to different people. If you don't disambiguate somehow, a web registry based on a phrase may make no sense.

There are three distinct meanings of the phrase "business intelligence". The first is something about software for analyzing business data -- like my blog. The second is news about businesses, which is interesting but unrelated. These are some of those blogs:

MEED NEWS, EMARKETS.DE, B2B TRADE, DEALBOOK, ARUNDEL BUSINESS NEWS, FOREX TRADING INFO, THE FINANCE KID, ARBITRAGE MAGAZINE, SMALL BUSINESS SUPPORT

The third meaning is based on a completely different meaning of intelligence -- intelligence as in IQ, as opposed to intelligence as in information for analysis. In the sense business intelligence just means being smart about business, which could men just about anything.

So Alltop's business intelligence page contain sites that are not at all related to the #businessintelligence tag on Twitter. A lot of these seem to be advice about sales and entrepreneurship or general management consulting blogs. A few are just political blogs, or blogs about general market or marketing trends. They're fine in their way, I guess, just misplaced. Here's a list:

STATSPOTTING!, WSJ: THE NUMBERS GUY, MANAGE BY WALKING AROUND, BUILDING BUSINESS VALUE, CORPORATE MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES, KNOWLEDGE WORKS, HUSTLEKNOCKIN', THE THINK HERE BLOG, LEAD VIEWS, THE SOLOPRENEUR LIFE, SMEDIO, INTERCALL BLOG, GLOBAL INSTITUTE FOR INSPIRATION, SMALL BUSINESS SUPPORT, RED WING SOFTWARE BLOG, FRED67 B2B REFERRAL CLUB, RESULTS.COM BUSINESS GROWTH TIPS

I'm not criticizing any of these guys, just saying they seem to be improperly categorized.

Also Alltop is syndicating advertising material thinly disguised as blogs. Of course, maybe they're getting paid, what do I know? If not they should be. The following are BI vendors, which may or may not be problem:

RED WING SOFTWARE BLOG, LOGIXML, BIME - SAAS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI), BLOG.JINFONET.COM, MICROSTRATEGY 101, PANORAMA BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

In addition, there are several aggregators -- Yahoo, and Beyenetwork twice. These guys can be seen as comptetitors, I guess.

In the end I think that the lack of careful stewardship reduces the usefulness of the site. The problem is that business intelligence is a vague term and needs a semantic Web to be useful. Manual editing in a web registry is a workaround, but it is not being used here to much effect.