The company declined to discuss forward-looking profit forecasts, citing a quiet period. .
In additional to managing and optimizing delivery fleets — it claims its customers increase their first-time deliver efforts by 22percentt and save 2.3 man hours per staffer per day — FarEye includes analytics that can predict the best locations for a hub, optimal transportation types, and forward-looking business and logistics forecasts.
Even so, Knapp does not expect executives to be particularly aggressive with their forward-looking guidance, and "if future forecasts aren't going up as a result of solid earnings in Q1, there will probably be a lot of disappointment" that could throw the brakes on equities.
They observe that higher levels of forward-looking disclosures lead to increased forecast accuracy.
We find that the contemporaneous Taylor rule produces a lower uncertainty and higher accuracy of interval forecasts than the forward-looking Taylor rule.
Germany eked out growth of 0.3percentt, marginally beating forecasts, but its forward-looking ZEW sentiment index slid for a fourth month running, undercutting even the lowest estimate in a Reuters poll.
The chart below compares the economists' forecasts in the two forward-looking quarters — for example, the growth rate in the summer and fall as predicted by economists in the spring — against the actual value of G.D.P.
Already the market, a forward-looking indicator, seems to be looking beyond the valley of these tough times and forecasting a brighter second half for 2008.
"It's very difficult to forecast revolutions," says Kenneth Lay, Enron's forward-looking chief executive.
Company bosses around the world will need to take charge and give serious consideration to the potential of a big data programme, shifting the mindset from that of retrospective analysis and forecasting to one of real-time, forward-looking intelligence.
