FOX21 to host panel on state of the economy
(COLORADO SPRINGS) — On Thursday, June 12, at 9:27 p.m., FOX21 News will host three experts in economics for a panel on the state of the economy.
With so much uncertainty about the economy, FOX21 invited three experts–Chris Abeyta, Co-Founder and Owner of Confidence Financial Partners; Dr. Tatiana Bailey, Director of Data-Driven Economic Strategies; and Dirk Hobbs, Founder and Executive Publisher of Colorado Media Group–to better help you understand what you should know and look out for in the future.
After the 30-minute panel airs on Thursday, the full panel will be available in the video player above.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Entrepreneur
4 hours ago
- Entrepreneur
Why Qualitative Feedback Is the Most Valuable Metric You're Not Tracking
It's easy to get swept up in the world of data. But if you work in the marketing field, you may have noticed a recent shift when it comes to measuring success. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. For years, marketers have been obsessed with metrics and data-driven strategies, optimizing for numbers more than people. Don't get me wrong, data is important in marketing. But many of us have operated with the mindset that if we just gather enough numbers, we can predict exactly what will drive success. With every click, view and interaction being tracked, we've been rooted in data and perfect attribution models. It's easy to get swept up in the world of data. But if you work in the marketing field, you may have noticed a recent shift when it comes to measuring success. I know I have. Privacy regulations have tightened, and consumer behaviors are changing faster than ever. Marketers now have less access to the granular data they once relied on, leaving us with fewer exact insights. Success is starting to hinge more on qualitative customer feedback and brand perception. Not just perfect attribution models. It's an important reminder of the humanity, magic and nuance needed in marketing, and that sometimes the most powerful strategies don't come from numbers alone. In some ways, I feel like we're returning to the "Mad Men" era. Success centered around big ideas and overall impact, not hyper-targeted campaigns based on data. Today, marketers are rediscovering the power of qualitative customer feedback and good old-fashioned human insight and intuition. So, marketers, it's time to get comfortable with a little less data and a little more time spent connecting with your customers. Related: 11 Effective Marketing Strategies to Help Streamline Your Startup How to get the qualitative feedback you need Here's the challenge: as businesses grow, it's harder to gather impactful qualitative insights. It's not like the early days when you could pick up the phone and call the few customers you have. If you're not careful, it can also quickly turn into a major timesuck (and a hindrance to your customers). It takes time and effort, but there are a few old-school tactics that can make a huge difference: Customer visits: Get in the room Remember when businesses would send their teams to visit customers in person? It turns out it's hard to replace face-to-face interaction. At Wisita, we've found that customers are far more honest in person, revealing product issues or feedback they might not mention over the phone, email or in surveys. In fact, some of our most meaningful product pivots came from face-to-face visits or unscripted calls. I still remember a time when a customer walked us through how they were misusing a feature we thought was intuitive. It was a wake-up call. And it led us to overhaul the interface for that tool completely. This type of direct "people feedback" is invaluable. It's a core part of our user research and early stages of product design. We sometimes even bring product mockups and prototypes to meetings to understand if we're building something of any value. Face-to-face meetings aren't always fully scalable. But it's definitely worth the effort when you need honest insights. Related: He Was Scared to Give His Business Partners Bad News. Then He Realized a Gamechanging Truth. The power of the right surveys Surveys are still one of the easiest ways to get feedback when done right. My first piece of advice? Avoid blindly sending out surveys to your customers without much thought to context or timing. You're asking people to give up a chunk of time out of their day to help you out. So make their time worthwhile. Also, think about your end goal for your survey. What kind of feedback would be most helpful? What point in the customer journey is best to ask for this feedback? For example, if you're diagnosing customer conversion issues, try placing a survey on your "help" and "signup" pages. It's a simple but powerful way to understand why people aren't taking the next step. At Wistia, we learned this the hard way. We used to send out a big survey at the end of every trial period, hoping to understand what was working and what wasn't. But the responses were all over the place. Too late, too vague. So we changed our approach. Instead of casting a wide net, we added a single question directly to the signup page: "What's holding you back from upgrading today?" The timing was everything. When people were in the moment, facing real friction, their answers got straight to the heart of what we needed to fix. Survey format is also key. Look at Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. The data output is useful, but the real gold is in the comments. The qualitative feedback is what tells the full story and helps companies find actionable insights. Take the time to experiment with what survey mode and format works best for you. Related: Take Control of What Your Online Presence Says About You Customer story time Sometimes, the best feedback comes in the form of a story. Early on at Wistia, we listed our phone number on our website and encouraged customers to call with questions. Yes, we would help callers with their inquiries. But it was also helpful for us to hear what people wanted and where they were struggling. We were able to refine our product based on those conversations. As we grew, we turned this idea into "Customer Story Time." At our weekly all-hands meetings, we encourage employees to share customer conversations to help give the team insight into what's working and what's not. This simple practice of sharing qualitative feedback reminds the entire company of the human beings they're serving and helps us best market our products. At the end of the day, marketing will always center around connecting with people. The data will always be there and will continue to play a role in guiding decisions. But the sweet spot is when we take a step back, get comfortable with a little ambiguity and remember that humans are at the heart of everything we do. The future of marketing is in the stories, the feedback and the humanity behind every interaction. Old-school marketing is back, and here to stay.


Business Wire
5 hours ago
- Business Wire
PuppyGraph Announces New Native Integration to Support Databricks' Managed Iceberg Tables
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PuppyGraph, the first real-time, zero-ETL graph query engine, today announced native integration with Managed Iceberg Tables on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. This milestone allows organizations to run complex graph queries directly on Iceberg Tables governed by Unity Catalog- no data movement and no ETL pipelines. "Databricks' new Iceberg capabilities provide a truly open, scalable foundation. With PuppyGraph, teams can ask complex relationship-driven questions without ever leaving their lakehouse. " -- Weimo Liu, CEO of PuppyGraph Share Databricks Managed Iceberg Tables, launching in Public Preview at this year's Data + AI Summit, offers full support for the Apache Iceberg™ REST Catalog API. This allows external engines, such as Apache Spark™, Apache Flink™, and Apache Kafka™, to interoperate seamlessly with tables governed by Unity Catalog. Managed Iceberg Tables provide automatic performance optimizations, which deliver cost-efficient storage and lightning-fast queries out of the box. By combining PuppyGraph's in-place graph engine with the openness and scale of Managed Iceberg Tables, teams can now: Query massive Iceberg datasets as a live graph, in real-time Use graph traversal to detect fraud, lateral movement, and network paths Perform Root Cause Analysis on telemetry data using service relationship graphs Eliminate the need for ETL into siloed graph databases Scale analytics across petabytes with minimal operational overhead Coinbase and CipherOwl are joint customers of Databricks and PuppyGraph. At the Data + AI Summit, both will share how graph analytics has powered their products and enabled real-time insights directly on managed lakehouses. "This changes how graph analytics fits into the modern data stack," said Weimo Liu, CEO of PuppyGraph. "Databricks' new Iceberg capabilities provide a truly open, scalable foundation. With PuppyGraph, teams can ask complex relationship-driven questions without ever leaving their lakehouse." To learn more about how PuppyGraph integrates with Apache Iceberg™ and the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, visit or see the joint talk with Coinbase at Data + AI Summit 2025. About PuppyGraph: PuppyGraph is the first and only real time, zero-ETL graph query engine in the market, empowering data teams to query existing relational data stores as a unified graph model deployed in under 10 minutes, bypassing traditional graph databases' cost, latency, and maintenance hurdles. Capable of scaling with petabytes of data and executing complex 10-hop queries in seconds, PuppyGraph supports use cases from enhancing LLMs with knowledge graphs to fraud detection, cybersecurity and more. Trusted by industry leaders, including Coinbase, Netskope, CipherOwl, Prevalent AI, Clarivate, and more. Learn more at and follow the company on LinkedIn, YouTube and X.


Fast Company
6 hours ago
- Fast Company
The unseen expenses of outdated data and how to address them
Enterprise retail operations often rely on syndicated, anonymized data to inform decisions about demand and customer sentiment. This reliance often masks significant hidden costs, including missed opportunities, inaccurate forecasts, and diminished customer engagement. Likewise, health care organizations are routinely held back by obsolete data in situations where efficacy and patient safety require high levels of accuracy. The pitfalls associated with outdated data strategies include reduced agility, misinformed decision-making, and the inability to compete with data-driven competitors. However, the transformative potential of first-party data and real-time intelligence is helping innovative retailers and health care organizations achieve greater precision, agility, and personalization. By uncovering hidden expenses tied to imprecise data, retailers and health care organizations can begin to build a business case for updating their intelligence-gathering processes. Timeliness in health care is non-negotiable. When medical data lags behind reality, the consequences can be dire. Consider a hospital receiving plasma or chemotherapy drugs that have been compromised due to improper condition control. If this issue is identified only after patient administration, the repercussions extend beyond financial loss —lives are at stake. Even if the problem is caught before treatment, delays in identifying compromised shipments mean postponed care, reduced trust in the provider, and operational inefficiencies as replacements are procured at additional cost. Traditional methods for monitoring health care shipments often involve stickers that change color based on exposure. While these indicators help, they rely on error-prone manual inspection and provide data that is already outdated by the time the issue is detected, leaving them with no ability to alter anything or save the expensive life-saving inventories. Health care shipments require real-time monitoring and notification of excursions the moment they occur to empower providers to take immediate corrective action. By leveraging live intelligence, health care organizations can prevent waste, maintain compliance, and most importantly, ensure patient safety (full disclosure: SmartSense offers this solution). Retailers also suffer from the repercussions of delayed and inaccurate data. Consider the shipment of high-value appliances. If a dishwasher sustains damage during transit, but this information only reaches the retailer after the product is delivered to the customer, the business must absorb the cost of replacement or offer compensation—both of which erode margins. Worse, dissatisfied customers may take their business elsewhere, leading to lost revenue and reputational damage. Access to real-time data combined with alert triggers and prescribed actions can help mitigate these costs (full disclosure: SmartSense offers this solution). If impact damage is detected at the moment of occurrence, businesses can proactively reschedule deliveries, file insurance claims, and manage customer expectations before frustration arises. The ability to respond instantly transforms customer service from reactive to proactive, helping reduce losses and improve brand loyalty. Beyond direct financial losses, outdated data impairs operational workflows. In logistics, tracking systems may indicate an expected delivery time based on outdated schedules, leaving warehouse teams unprepared when a shipment arrives early or late. The result is often inefficiency, wasted labor hours, and increased costs associated with storage and handling. By integrating real-time data feeds into logistics systems, including time and motion data, companies can synchronize operations with actual conditions, helping to optimize labor deployment and reduce unnecessary delays. This principle applies across industries—whether in inventory management, supply chain coordination, or workforce scheduling, businesses benefit when decisions are based on live intelligence rather than outdated projections. ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGES Organizations looking to mitigate the costs of outdated data should focus on the following strategies: 1. Use real-time data collection tools. Review the proper hardware and software requirements for capturing live intelligence on critical operations. 2. Integrate data streams into workflows. Ensure real-time descriptive insights are accessible and actionable by embedding them into SOPs and decision-making systems. 3. Adopt predictive and prescriptive analytics. Beyond just collecting data, leverage advanced analytics to anticipate issues and recommend corrective actions before they escalate to optimize outcomes. 4. Improve cross-departmental data sharing. Establish seamless data flow between supply chain, customer service, and operations teams. 5. Continuously refine data accuracy. Implement checks and balances to validate incoming data, ensuring reliability and minimizing the risk of acting on faulty intelligence. THE HIDDEN COSTS OF OUTDATED DATA Outdated data is more than just an inconvenience—it is a silent drain on financial resources, operational efficiency, and customer trust. In sectors where precision, accuracy, and timing are critical, reliance on lagging information can lead to substantial losses and, in extreme cases, life-threatening consequences. By recognizing and addressing these hidden costs and prioritizing the availability of critical information, organizations can not only mitigate risk but also unlock new levels of efficiency, customer loyalty, and growth.