This quote from Niccolò Machiavelli – an Italian politician, historian, and philosopher from the Renaissance period, has profound relevance to emerging technologies.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of building a machine learning model using BigQuery ML. As a bonus, we’ll have the chance to use BigQuery’s support for spatial functions. We’ll use the New York City taxicab dataset, with the goal of predicting taxi fare, given both pick-up and drop-off locations for each ride — imagine that we are designing a trip planner.

July was a huge month for merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in the BI space. Thoughtspot raised $145 million, Salesforce acquired Datorama, Workday acquired Stories.bi and Tableau acquired Empirical Systems.

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a metric that signals how well a company is achieving important business objectives. Here’s how to set and track yours.