So, I recently was invited to give a presentation about our company to a sizable crowd, and I needed a simple way to give everyone an idea of how we work — and how our team could deliver smart, savvy market insights to them. As a result, what we call a “public portal” was born.

After all, we can’t show off a “private,” password-protected portal belonging to one of our clients — such as, oh, say, the cyber-security firm that serves the federal government.

C’mon. You know we can’t.

For demonstration purposes, we figured we could settle on a subject that a couple of members of our team are passionate about: Spanish food and wine. We love Spain. (My great-grandmother was from the southern city of Cádiz. My husband played a Spanish tennis tournament to win the money needed to pay for my engagement ring. My children attend an international school in Denver recognized by Spain’s Ministry of Education. I could go on and on …)

My Media Salad colleagues and I also have been following Spain’s troubled economy and various food and wine markets with great interest. The country is working aggressively to export goods and services well beyond its traditional European stomping grounds. Its unique offerings are of fine quality and winning more hearts — and money — around the world. Take, for example, England, where the country’s largest grocery chains are reporting that Spanish foods are outselling longstanding Italian favorites. One grocery-store representative even announced that Spanish foods are the fastest growing segment of new cuisine in Great Britain. Ireland is raving about the flavors of Spain’s traditional tapas, too.

Simply put, we believe American companies will find great business opportunities in Spain — and we know we’re the right people to assist their market research.

The portal we’ve spun up is partially functioning and intentionally designed to provide only an idea of what Media Salad could do for your company or organization. Still, I’m pleased that we’ve identified an information niche that we happen to like — and that also stands to deliver a decent public service. When we looked around, we found very few websites that draw from Spanish news organizations, government agencies and universities, and from sources around the world to deliver to native English speakers a thoughtful, clear and connected look at Spain’s food and wine industries. (Online translation tools are going to get you only so far …)

Sure, you could drop tens of thousands of dollars on pricey market reports — but by visiting us first, maybe you’ll have a better sense of whether those reports would be worth the expense.

We plan to spin up plenty of other “public portals” that are focused on niche information that isn’t found easily. I’ll introduce those as they launch.

And yes, my presentation went well.

Global sales of business intelligence (BI) tools generated $10.5 billion in revenue in 2010 — up 13.4 percent over the previous year, according to market research firm Gartner.

Industry experts agree that smart BI tools are only one part of an important equation. For the best results, they must be used by efficient and effective researchers, analysts and communicators.

However, the world’s workforce isn’t equipped to meet skyrocketing demands for business intelligence — which include continual and forward-looking analyses of a competitive marketplace. Colleges and universities are woefully behind in offering instruction that prepares graduates to meet employers’ actual needs, according to an international survey sponsored by Business Intelligence Congress II, a meeting of BI professors and industry professionals.

Of 129 colleges and universities surveyed, only three offered BI instruction at the undergraduate level, and only 12 offered BI instruction in graduate programs.

“Also, students are not being exposed to a BI that reflects real-world context,” said Barbara Wixom, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce who also directs Teradata University Network, which conducted the survey.

Universities are struggling to provide students with real-world training partly because companies don’t want to provide their proprietary information for classroom instruction — making it hard for professors like Wixom to develop adequate BI curricula.

That juggernaut is not going to slow demand for BI-savvy employees. In the United States alone, roughly 190,000 workers with “deep analytical talent” and another 1.5 million “data-savvy managers and analysts” will be needed by 2018, according to projections released in May by McKinsey Global Institute.

Media Salad, Inc., is where the best of fact-finding — the digging, the interviewing, the records reviews, the analyzing, the dot-connecting and the communicating — meets business. Our collaborative team of veteran journalists, economists and industry consultants is uniquely qualified to deliver independent information to support sound strategic decisions. Learn more about our services.

Starting at just 20 cents a page, you, too, could produce a full-color, glossy. Think promotional marketing materials that explain your goods and services. Or how about a catalog? Or a magazine you and hundreds of your wildly talented writer, editor, artist, photographer, programmer and videographer friends from around the world get together to produce in only 48 hours?

You see where we’re going with this. The possibilities are endless.

MagCloud users upload a PDF of their magazine, and let HP handle the rest. The company promises delivery in as little as three days. For additional fees, you can choose polished bindings and options for mailing around the world. MagCloud will even manage mailings and maintain your subscriber database. Magazines can also be made available in digital-only formats and purchased from the MagCloud site for review on desktops and mobile devices.

Our intern likes strong coffee - and working in coffee shops.

Our company is busy — but never too busy to train young people to become excellent researchers and communicators.

We’re pleased to introduce Pedro Monedero Izquierdo, who will intern with Media Salad for several months. Pedro is a student at the University Jaume I in Castellon, Spain, where he is majoring in advertising.  You can find some of his student work — including a Mercedes-Benz commercial that was named a finalist in a national competition among young creatives in Spain — here and here.

By his own admission, Pedro has a lot to learn — and yet we’ve noticed he’s already thinking more smartly about the advertising industry than many people who have been in it for years. Pedro understands that sound research builds the strongest foundation for effective messaging, brand positioning, relationship-building and business development. He understands that the best research isn’t limited to Web searches and canned market reports. It might involve inspection of public records. It might include personal phone calls and visits like those Media Salad makes on behalf of its clients every day.

Pedro also understands that a market shift can happen in an instant: a sordid email compromises a political candidate, an earthquake stops production for months, the price of a key ingredient spikes. While working for Media Salad, he’ll learn more — much more — about how to gather, analyze and report news and information rapidly to inform strategic decisions.

Pedro is keenly interested in social media. We like that about him, too. We recently asked him to share with us some of his favorite blogs for learning about social networks. He gave us this list (and yes, some of these sites are written in Spanish):

• http://www.yorokobu.es
• http://www.godsavethebrief.com
• http://elpoderdelasideas.com
• http://www.thefwa.com
• http://fearlessrevolution.com
• http://www.anuncios.com
• http://www.territoriocreativo.es

Pedro hopes to meet other young innovators in communication while he’s in the Denver area — so you can bet that he’ll be attending an upcoming meeting of Colorado’s chapter of Hacks and Hackers. You’ll also be able to find him on Twitter and Facebook.

Media Salad will provide the (locally made!) beer and snacks for this inaugural meeting of Hacks/Hackers in Colorado. Track the group on Twitter: @HacksHackersCO and #hhco and on Facebook.

If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by. The meeting specifics:

When: 6:30 p.m., Wed., April 27, 2011

Where: WorkBrite @ Conference Edge – 4120 Brighton Blvd. A40 Denver, CO

The chief executive officer of a cyber-security firm headquartered in Colorado attended a business meeting and quickly realized he didn’t know everyone in the room. The meeting had been called by another firm — which failed to alert the CEO that the representative of a third company would be joining them at the table.

Very bad form, we know.

But the CEO, a Media Salad client, knew where to turn for help. He quietly texted a Media Salad reporter with the name of the person he didn’t know, her title and the company she represented. Was the firm a potential competitor? A potential collaborator? Why would it be interested in the deal being discussed?

Media Salad’s veteran reporter immediately searched for answers and e-mailed a brief report that the CEO scanned discreetly on his mobile device. He remained guarded during the meeting — but also knew how to ensure the discussion played completely to his company’s advantage.

The chief executive officer and lead analyst of a cyber-security firm headquartered in Colorado called on Media Salad for help only a few days before heading to a large trade show in Las Vegas. Their goals were to make meaningful and personal connections with executives at a half dozen target companies and to walk away with at least a dozen solid sales leads.

We help you strategize

Covering the show floor — where nearly 1,000 companies and organizations were exhibiting — would have been tough without a smart plan and the help of Media Salad’s veteran reporters, who are experts at working in just about any mission-critical environment. Before the show, we recommended ways for the executives to navigate the event quickly and efficiently and briefed them about target companies and key contacts scheduled to appear there.

We help you execute

During the trade show, the executives frequently tapped into their Media Salad Market Intelligence Portal, where they found continuously updated information about the people, companies and subject matter they specifically wanted to know more about. A Media Salad reporter in Colorado worked on demand to handle their requests for information. As the executives collected business cards and brochures and gleaned leads from conversations, they alerted the reporter — who put the information into context specifically relevant to the cyber-security firm.

“Media Salad connected the dots in ways we never could have in a place like that,” the firm’s CEO said. “So many people we talked to were really impressed by how much we knew about their industry and their operations. Our business-development efforts got off to a great start.”

A Denver advertising agency turned to Media Salad for help after landing an account with a large hospital wanting to promote its bariatric surgery services. Within a month, the agency was expected to submit a general plan for a public-outreach campaign. The agency’s account-management team needed to learn in a hurry about bariatric medicine, the physicians who practice it and specific hospital dynamics that result in quality care.

We connect our clients to the experts

Media Salad immediately scouted for the best people to give industry insight to the agency. Our staff quickly introduced the lead account manager — the guy responsible for making that big presentation to the hospital — to a highly skilled surgeon who lives in another state and also has a master’s degree in business administration.

A Media Salad reporter scheduled and facilitated a meeting between the surgeon and the account manager. For two hours, they visited in person and talked in detail about everything the account manager needed to know.

“It really helped to have a highly knowledgeable, objective third party look at the situation and speak openly about it,” the account manager said after the meeting. “I got an insider’s perspective and didn’t have to learn a lot of things about my client the hard way.”

The Media Salad reporter observed the meeting, and, as good journalists do, asked the surgeon plenty of follow-up questions. The reporter’s skillful interviewing helped ensure the account manager didn’t leave out anything important or overlook the potential significance of the surgeon’s remarks and recommendations.

We deliver key insights

Only a few hours after the meeting, Media Salad’s reporter summarized the most salient points of the conversation and loaded them — along with supporting material the surgeon referenced — into the Media Salad Market Intelligence Portal. Our research findings, coupled with the surgeon’s recommendations, served as the foundation for the advertising agency’s general plan for public outreach and helped the account manager make a great presentation.

“Heads nodded the entire time I was in the room,” the account manager said.

Sure, there are some bugs to be worked out, but so far, so interesting.In just a matter of minutes, we pulled together our first “story” in Storify — a collection of links to sites and social media chatter relevant to the work of one of our clients, a school specializing in the delivery of full-immersion, bilingual education.

No, that Storify story ain’t our finest writing — but if you think we’re after great narrative flow here, you’re totally missing the point. Jeff Mason, director of Media Salad’s Client Creative Services, recently nailed the importance of new publishing tools such as Storify:

“As our capacity to digest information has been eclipsed by the volume of information available — and interesting — to us, we are attracted to a different kind of person — the curator. Greater value will be found in following, friending and subscribing to people who pull real-time digital content into rich and high-quality, narratives. Aggregation and curation has great value when there’s a large quantity of information spread widely across numerous sources, and judging the quality and credibility requires expertise.”

Key word there: expertise. Aggregation, algorithms and publishing tools like Storify are nice, but true value is derived from them only when they’re put in the hands of smart people who are specially skilled at gathering, analyzing and presenting information. Media Salad’s veteran reporters know how to move quickly to deliver timely, actionable information that informs strategic decisions. But yes, we’re always grateful for tools that help us work faster and more efficiently.

And we have to be honest here: we’re rooting for Storify’s success in part because it is the brainchild of a dynamic team that includes former Associated Press reporter Burt Herman, who also founded the journotech Meetup group Hacks/Hackers. We really dig journalists who not only talk about new ways to do business, but actually roll up their sleeves and make it happen.

The field of big drug makers racing to produce an effective weight-loss drug not only is narrowing, it’s almost drying up.

In the last month alone, the Food and Drug Administration has rejected approval for two new drugs and forced the withdrawal of a third that had been on the market for more than a decade. And in the last few years, several of the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest names — including Abbott Laboratories, Merck & Co. and Sanofi-Aventis — have tried and failed to take anti-obesity and weight-loss drugs to market. The F.D.A. hasn’t approved a prescription diet pill since 1999, when it gave a nod to Roche’s Xenical, now the only weight-management drug approved for long-term use.

The F.D.A. hasn’t acted without its reasons — but experts say pharmaceutical companies are increasingly discouraged from working on drugs for obesity, one of the nation’s biggest health problems. One-third of Americans are obese, and another third are overweight — conditions that lead to cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

One new diet drug — Contrave, developed by La Jolla, Calif.,-based Orexigen Therapeutics — is scheduled for an F.D.A. commission’s consideration in December. If it fails to win approval, expect to see the pharmaceutical industry “put the brakes on all obesity drug development for a decade,” Dr. W. Timothy Garvey, chairman of the department of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the New York Times.

Garvey knows the pharmaceutical industry’s disappointment firsthand. He was an investigator in the clinical trials of Qnexa, produced by Mountain View, Calif.,-based Vivus, Inc., and widely touted as the most promising weight-loss drug in more than a decade. The F.D.A. declined to approve Qnexa last month because of concerns about birth defects and heart problems. Two weeks later, the agency rejected another new drug, Lorcaserin, produced by Arena Pharmaceuticals in San Diego, because it caused tumors in rats. Both companies say they’re hopeful that they’ll produce information that addresses the F.D.A.’s concerns and wins their drugs approval next year.

Even drugs out on the market for some time have experienced significant setbacks. F.D.A. oversight resulted in the Oct. 8 recall of Meridia, produced by Abbott and sold for 13 years. Federal officials cited the risk of heart attacks and strokes for certain patients.

Aside from Contrave, Media Salad reporters are watching a drug developed by Novo Nordisk A/S to treat Type 2 diabetes. The Danish company headquartered in Copenhagen is the world’s largest maker of insulin, controlling 52 percent of the world’s market. In January, Novo Nordisk won F.D.A. approval for Victoza in the treatment of diabetes. Consumers who used the drug have reported significant weight loss — prompting Novo Nordisk to conduct late-stage studies of Victoza as an antiobesity agent.

Victoza is a synthetic version of the naturally occurring hormone GLP-1. The hormone is produced after eating and prompts the pancreas to make insulin.

Novo said in October that it expects annual Victoza sales to reach $1 billion by 2012 — roughly two years sooner than expected. And when speaking with reporters in the last week, Chief Executive Officer Lars Sorensen said annual sales of $2.5 billion later this decade are “within reach” — perhaps indicating his confidence that Novo will win F.D.A. approval to extend the Victoza label as a treatment for obesity.

Given that the F.D.A. already has approved Victoza for market, it’ll be interesting to see whether it approves the label’s extension – especially because the agency has backed itself into a corner, according to Morgan Downey, an advocate for obese people who also consults with pharmaceutical companies. Downey, a harsh critic of the F.D.A.’s recent drug rejections, said the agency has behaved as if it believes an effective drug like Victoza would be overused, resulting in unanticipated, adverse side effects, and that less effective drugs aren’t worth any risks.

“The F.D.A. has gotten itself into a real knot,” Mr. Downey told the New York Times.  “They can’t approve a very effective drug, and they can’t approve a modest drug.”

Meanwhile, Novo’s weight-loss trials for Victoza continue.