So Much Information!

You may have noticed that our e-zine (that's what e-mail newsletters are known as) features many stories that aren't about the typical entertainment subjects you find in industry magazines, such who just introduced what new game, or trends in go-kart track design, etc. Instead, we cover more macro topics, including such areas as sociology, business management, demography, environmental psychology, child development, and women's studies, as well as cover industries 'outside the box,' all of which have a major impact or influence on what is required for the successful development and operation of LBEs.

Where do we get all the information found in our articles? Little is from entertainment industry sources. Each month, we read over 70 magazines and journals from a diverse area of fields, including various design disciplines, sociology, consumer industries, the hospitality and restaurant industries, retail, marketing, business, psychology, the list is endless. Additionally we receive dozens of daily, weekly and monthly summaries of news from many industries and compilations of recent research. We also have spiders that crawl the Web every day and report back to us that day's news on many topics. Then, on top of all that, we read a lot of books on diverse topics. This all adds up to a lot of reading.

So why do we do this? Because we believe that in today's rapidly changing and increasingly competitive marketplace, the only way we can help our clients succeed is to stay as informed as possible and to be constantly looking at what is happening outside the standard 'entertainment industry box.' That's the way we evolved the children's edutainment concepts our company is well known for; by getting outside of the industry box. That's the way we evolved entertainment center concepts that aren't stuck in the industry paradigm where dinosaurs roam. That's the way we evolved new eatertainment concepts we are introducing our clients to. And some of this knowledge, not all, but some, we share with you in this monthly e-zine.

Have you ever wondered how much new information is produced each year? In 2002, 5 exabytes of new information were produced in print, film, and magnetic and optical storage media. 92% of that new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly hard disks.

How big is five exabytes? As a numeric number, it is the number 5 followed by 18 zeros. Here's how it looks:

5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

The Library of Congress contains 10 terabytes of information. It would take 500,000 Libraries of Congress to equal all the new information producedin the world each year.

If the 19 million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress were digitized, they would equal ten terabytes. It would take half a million libraries the size of the Library of Congress to equal five exabytes.

Another way to grasp the size of five exabytes is that if every person in the world, about 6.3 billion people, had 30 feet of books, that would equal five exabytes.

In 2002, printed-paper was used to store 1.6 petabytes of original information. That's 160 times the amount of information in the Library of Congress. Yet paper is only used to store 0.01% of all new information.

Think the computer has introduced us to the paperless society? No way! It takes about 800 million trees to produce the world's annual paper supply and on average, each person in North America annually consumes about 12,000 sheets of paper, 85% of this is in the form of office documents.

In 2003, the World Wide Web contained about 170 terabytes of information on its surface, 17 times the information in the Library of Congress print collections. However, the deep Web, including database driven Websites that create pages on demand or that you can only access with passwords, is estimated to have 500 as much information, or 90 petabytes

And if all these tera and peta and exabytes aren't enough to totally intimidate you with all the new information in the world each year, get this. The amount of stored information grows 30% a year.

So if you are still in search of some good bytes for your summer reading, here's some books (serious stuff, not light novels) that Randy White, our CEO, has recently read and would recommend:

• The Support Economy by Zuboff & Maxmim
• Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill (also his previous book Why We Buy)
• Trading Up: The New American Luxury by Michael Silverstein
• Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again by Lewis Carbone
• The Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkins