Last week, Rapid Insight team members attended #ELIVE18 in sunny San Diego.  We were greeted with a keynote address from Dr. Jill Biden and Malala Yousafzi, enlightened by collaborative sessions, visited by attendees from all walks of the higher education industry and kissed by the sun, a pleasant change from snowy New England in our opinion!

A diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and skillsets are attributes that help any organization to succeed, regardless of industry. The same is true of data. One conflict between those two truths, is that, not everyone in an organization feels equally comfortable working with data nor do they have the background required to do so. That is exactly why we’re all so excited to introduce Veera Bridge

Rapid Insight’s powerful and easy to use analytics products are now aligned under one simple, clean, modern brand and platform called Veera. Veera enables any organization to build a truly data-driven culture. Affordable and easy to use, Veera enables exploration, drives curiosity, and makes critical business insights accessible to more people, and more quickly, than ever before.

Being a data analyst, I am always interested in the data behind any sport, so I decided to take a look at the Biathlon World Cup data to see what things could be discovered. The Biathlon World Cup started in November of this year and will continue till March so I have 7 events worth of information that I can analyze (including the Olympics). Using Rapid Insight Veera I was able to pull data directly from the International Biathlon Union website

Did you know that American Pharaoh, the first horse to win the grand slam of thoroughbred racing, was chosen early on as a once in a lifetime horse simply because of how large his left ventricle was?  Or that Walmart stocks up on Strawberry Frosted Pop Tarts before big storms, since they sell seven times faster during those times?  These are just two of the facts that I learned after reading Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s book ‘Everybody Lies’.

This past October, I attended TC17 where I had the chance to learn about Hyper, Tableau’s new in-memory data engine technology. Hyper enables a completely new level of analytical query processing for large and complex data sets. There has been a lot of excitement in the Tableau user community and so it was important for Veera to support Hyper right out of the gate.

As a long time user of Excel, what I love about Veera is its ability to make some of the more tedious Excel processes so much easier to accomplish. Here are six quick tips to help solve your Excel data troubles. 1. Make Merging Data Easier. Have you ever needed to join together data from two or more different but related spreadsheets? 

Today is Betty White’s 96th birthday. Pointing that out, I was challenged by a colleague, “Can you think of a data angle on this?” Why yes, yes I can.

Year-end is a time lots of lists are made and Google was right in the mix with their Year in Search 2017. The list shows us what we were all most interested in learning about last year. Topping the list are Hurricane Irma, the iPhone X and 8, Matt Lauer, and Meghan Markle.

This year, I set a goal for myself to read 24 books and, unlike some of those hard-to-reach New-Years resolutions, I stuck with it. So, I was thrilled when Goodreads emailed to ask me if I’d like to see my “year in review”- duh! Then it hit me that this is a perfect example of why descriptive statistics can be so fun (yes, I said fun).

My wife and I grew up in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area and relocated to New Hampshire in 1992. Since we both still have family “Down South”, we make trips around major holidays to visit them. 25 years of driving through one of the busiest traffic corridors in the US and we’ve become experts on the routes- how to get around Boston and NYC and when to leave so we miss rush hour traffic as well. When our kids were younger, we even knew where all of the McDonald’s Play Place stops were