My Favourite Tipples from a European intelligence expert
Jinfo Blog

By Irene Koren

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Irene Koren, a competitive and business intelligence expert based in Belgium. Irene shares her favourite online tools for international trade, strategic consulting and keeping up with news.

Item

Living and working in a small country like Belgium means that most projects involve research in several languages. Belgium's economy depends heavily on international trade, and consequently I also use sources from different countries and in different languages. The following are the ones that I find to be valuable:

• Blendle: The best comparison for Blendle is a newsstand in a train station, where you can browse through several newspapers and magazines before deciding to buy one. Blendle allows users to browse the main German, Dutch and Belgian press, but it also has some important English language sources like The Economist. You can purchase single articles or a complete issue, and the archive goes back up to two years.

• Duden: Whenever I have a project that involves German, I can't do without Duden. I use Duden to check the meaning or the spelling of a word, but it also helps me to optimise my search strategy. Building a list of German keywords is much easier while checking Duden's lists of synonyms and sentence examples.

• European Data Portal: This is a one-stop shop for data on all public bodies in Europe, and I often use it as a complementary source to Eurostat. The biggest advantage of European Data Portal is that it directly harvests open data from national data sources. Using EDP is much faster than checking all the individual data platforms separately.

• McKinsey Quarterly: For my fourth bullet, I want to add the online articles of the main strategic consulting firms, including McKinsey Quarterly and Think:Act Magazine from Roland Berger. These companies invest a lot in delivering high-value content on what matters most in today's business society.

For fun:

• One of my favourite tools is Audible. I love to read novels and it is always a struggle to find enough time for that. Audible's enormous collection of multi-language audiobooks allows me to listen to the best novels while working in the garden or going to appointments. It even helps me to do more exercise. I have made many detours on my bike just to be able to finish a thrilling chapter.

An article in Jinfo which I found particularly interesting:

• Marc Vollenweider gives us a glimpse of the future of our profession. With his article, "The emerging role of the information engineer", Marc provides valuable tips on how to develop our skills and remain relevant in a world dominated by technology and analytics.

Contribute your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the Jinfo audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@jinfo.com or visit the Publish with Jinfo page.

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