Month: January 2023

After three long years of pandemic, one of the world’s largest tech shows made a stunning come back this week as CES lit up Las Vegas with a flash of color and optimism.

The innovation was imaginative, presenting a vision of the future that may never see the light of day, but that didn’t stop the buzz from reaching a frenzy. With more than 100,000 thousand attendees and thousands of exhibitors scouring two million net square feet of exhibition space, there was a lot of excitement for what was being presented.

Here’s just a few of the products and experiences that stole the show.

BMW i Vision Dee

The color-changing concept car received an audible gasp during BMW’s cinematic keynote starring BMW Chairman Oliver Zipse, Arnold Schwarzenegger, David Hasselhoff, Knight Rider’s KITT and Herbie

Marketing Podcast with Marcel Petitpas

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Marcel Petitpas. Marcel is the CEO & Co-Founder of Parakeeto, a company dedicated to helping agencies measure and improve their profitability by streamlining their operations and reporting systems. Marcel is also the fractional COO at Gold Front and a speaker, podcast host, and consultant, specializing in Agency Profitability Optimization.

Key Takeaway:

The most profitable agencies have a winning formula that results in happy returning clients, steady growth, and continuous profit. In this episode, the CEO and Co-founder of Parakeeto, Marcel Petitpas, shares his insights on what that winning formula looks like and how agencies can optimize their businesses for profitability.

Questions I ask Marcel Petitpas:

• [1:49] What should we be measuring if we want to optimize for profitability?
• [4:14] When it comes to KPIs, how do we strike the right balance between too much

A while back, I was working on a project involving getting data from Excel files. The Excel files contain the data in sheets and tables. Getting the data from the tables is easy. However, the data in the sheets have some commentaries on top of the sheet, then the column names and then the data itself. Something like below:

This approach is pretty consistent across many Excel files. The customer wants to have the commentary in the column names when the data is imported into Power BI. So the final result must look like this:

The business requirement though is to combine the first 3 rows of data and promote it as the column name.

The Challenge

Let’s connect the Excel file and look at the data in Power BI Desktop.

As

Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group won regulatory approval to boost the registered capital of its consumer finance unit by 10.5 billion yuan ($1.5 billion), a move suggesting progress in the fintech giant’s efforts to restructure its operations to satisfy authorities’ demands.

Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance, which was established in 2021 to host Ant’s consumer-lending businesses, such as Huabei and Jiebei, got the greenlight to increase its capital to about $2.7 billion on December 29, according to a post published by the Chongqing unit of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission. This will allow Ant to handle more consumer-oriented loans and it eliminates another regulatory obstacle en route to completing its initial public offering that was abruptly shelved in 2020. Ant was told at the time that it had to

Marketing Podcast with Steve Miller

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Steve Miller. Meetings & Conventions Magazine calls Steve Miller the Idea Man for his unconventional, edgy, no-spin approach to marketing and branding. He is the author of the Amazon #1 bestseller, “UNCOPYABLE: How to Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition.” Steve’s speaking and consulting clients have ranged from entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 corporations, including Proctor & Gamble, Greystar Real Estate, Caterpillar, Boeing Airplane, Starbucks, Philips Electronics, and the prestigious TED Conference. We’re talking about his latest book — Stealing Genuis: The Seven Levels of Adaptive Innovation.

Key Takeaway:

Improvement is not innovation and innovation is essential if your aim is to survive in today’s business environment. Fixating your mind on improvement in today’s world is a dangerous path—one that ultimately leads to commoditization and irrelevance. In this episode, I talk with author,

This is the second part of my new series of Power BI posts named Power BI 101. In the previous post, I briefly discussed what Power BI is. In this post, I look into one of the most confusing parts for those who want to start learning Power BI. Many people jump straight online and look for Power BI training courses which there are plenty out there. But which one is the right training course for you? Let’s find out.

What do you want to gain from learning Power BI?

Regardless of attending paid training courses or being a self-learner, the above question is one of the most important questions you might ask yourself before going to the next steps. The answer to this question dictates the sort of training you must look for. Your answer to the preceding question can be one or none of the following:

• I