Hack your commute: Brush up on global trends

Do you know how many iPhones Apple sold in the first quarter of 2018? The answer is 64.52 million. How about the average OPEC crude oil price in 2018? No? It was $69.42 per gallon. Or which country has the most expensive Big Mac? Switzerland, of course, at $6.54.

In your defence, you might argue that you had no need to know any of these things, but depending on your industry sector, product category and geographical markets, any one of these data points – or others of seemingly random origin – could indeed be highly valuable information to have to hand. What’s even more helpful is that all of them can be found on the same website.

Statista.com gathers together statistics and market research studies from 22,500 sources, it claims, and presents them in one place for the benefit of anyone who would care to use them. These are divided up by industry sector and displayed according to recency and popularity, but with a huge archive also available to be browsed or searched.

The data is available to download in a variety of formats, such as images, PDFs or spreadsheets, and can be shared with a single click via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, or via a website embed. There’s a certain amount of free information available to everyone (around 7% of the one million statistics the site holds), but if you’re looking for specific data, it’s likely you would have to shell out $588 (£446) per year for an individual licence or convince your company to pay $7,188 (£5,451) for an annual corporate account.

Still, if that investment seems worthwhile, it could offer the opportunity to transform your commuting time into a daily crash course in global consumer trends. Never again will you be caught out in a meeting without knowing the value of hard rubber articles imported from the EU to the UK in 2017 (£875,000, apparently).