emerging destination index

Using the Emerging Markets Index released by Mastercard back in October, I’ve created something I’m going to call the Emerging Destination Index as a tool to provide clues as to which non-traditional tourist destinations may provide the fundamental infrastructure to sustain the type of travellers that I’ve been discussing over the last little while in this blog.

The original index data is available from Mastercard, and all I did was to reconfigure the weights assigned by the original methodology to assign more value to those dimensions that have a higher impact on the ability of a traveller to operate remotely from the region with fair access to a urban standard of living. These are the weights I assigned:

Economic and Commercial Environment (0%) – Used in the original index to measure time and costs for building a standard warehouse, registering a property, exporting/importing cargo, and rate corruption and foreign bond, it seemed mostly irrelevant for the purpose of this index, so I left it out.
Economic Growth and Development (10%) – Measuring the broad economic health and growth of the national economy this dimension seems to be the best way of describing the level of infrastructure that will [...]

cities with most twitter users

Continuing with the exploration of cities with a population actively engaged in global communications, here is a snapshot of the top 30 cities with most tweets (twitter messages) as calculated by TwitterLocal. The link presents the top 30 in the last 24 hours, here is a snapshot at the time of publishing:
167830

Tokyo – 13.5%
New York – 9.2%
San Francisco – 6.1%
Los Angeles – 5.9%
London – 4.9%
Washington – 4.1%
Chicago – 3.9%
Boston – 3.0%
Seattle – 3.0%
Sao Paulo – 2.7%

Other cities outside of North America included in the list: Osaka, Madrid, Sydney, Amsterdam, Paris, Melbourne, Berlin, Bangkok, Barcelona, Taipei, Santiago, Dublin and Caracas.