Earlier this year we reached the point where 90% of all the digital data in the world was created in the last two years. This extraordinary statistic almost makes it sound as if we were living in the dark ages back in 2010 when we knew so little! Cisco forecasts that global IP traffic will grow at a compound rate of 23% from 2012 to 2017. YouTube now has 100 hours of video uploaded to its site every minute, while Cisco tell us that they expect a million minutes of video to cross the internet every second in 2017. Read more …

Public interest in the investment portfolios of charities and other ethically minded groups has intensified this year.  The furore that surrounded the Church of England’s investment in money lender Wonga has been followed in relatively quick succession by the recent Panorama investigation into Comic Relief’s investment portfolio and its exposure to tobacco, alcohol and arms companies.

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Fiona Wolf is London’s 686th Lord Mayor, and only the second woman*, but she is approaching her tenure with an energy, sense of purpose and vision that might make some of her predecessors blanche.  At the launch this week of her Tomorrow’s City programme she spelt out her desire to harness the expertise of the City of London to meet the challenge of a VUCA world (to the uninitiated that stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) which is becoming ‘the New Normal’.

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We’ve all heard of ‘black swans’, the metaphor chosen by the author Nassim Taleb to represent highly improbable but high commercial impact events. But what do flamingos, starlings and pigeons have to teach us about business?

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