We must be willing to risk change to keep apace with rapid change. The key is moderation and balance, supported by enough information to allow meaningful feedback. Going online requires adaption by management and staff in developing the necessary skills and vision. This chapter starts with how to use the networks to manage projects. Next, we will show you how to watch competitors, prospects, suppliers, markets, technologies, and trends. It winds down with marketing and sales by modem.
Several services offer rental of private online conference areas to businesses. Corporations are discovering that such conferencing is efficient when coordinating a group of people geographically far apart from each other.
Online conferences are also useful when team members are constantly on the move and hard together face-to-face.
Some claim that people are more candid and meetings more efficient when they communicate online. They favor online discussions for brainstorming and productivity tasks, even when individuals and facilities are available for face-to-face meetings.
Many international companies use such services regularly. The applications range from tight coordination with suppliers and subcontractors, to development of company strategies, and new organizational structures.
Renting an online conference room has advantages over doing it in-house: The company does not have to buy software, hardware, expensive communications equipment. It does not need to hire people to operate and maintain the conferencing system. The more international the business, the better is the external alternative.
Many Internet access providers offer email based distributed conferencing for private groups. Some also offer interactive, live chats in private virtual meeting rooms on the net. CompuServe is one alternative.
For ideas about how to set up and operate a coordination conference, study how volunteer organizations do it. One place to check out is KIDPLAN, one of several coordination conferences used by KIDLINK (see Chapters 2 and 5).
KIDPLAN is usually most active during April and May each year. This is when their annual projects are being closed down, and new projects are started. Read the dialog between coordinators to get an idea of how the medium is being used.
Old conference messages are stored in notebook files. You can have the full coordination dialog for a given month sent you by email. Send all requests for notebook files to
listserv@listserv.nodak.edu
Getting notebook files is a two-step process. In your first message to the LISTSERV, ask for a list of available files. Do this by using the following command in your email:
INDEX KIDPLAN
The LISTSERV will return a list. The following part is of particular interest:
101/2/ KIDPLAN LOG9105B ALL OWN V 80 2397 91/05/14
23:40:22 Started on Wed, 8 May 91 00:11:09 CDT
102/2/ KIDPLAN LOG9105C ALL OWN V 80 3141 91/05/21
20:44:16 Started on Wed, 15 May 91 01:24:51 CDT
104/2/ KIDPLAN LOG9105D ALL OWN V 80 2685 91/05/28
22:34:31 Started on Wed, 22 May 91 17:01:21 +0200
Do not worry about the details. You are only interested in file names, and dates. The file LOG9105B contains all messages from 8 May 1991 until 15 May.
If you want all these three files, send a message to the LISTSERV with the following commands:
GET KIDPLAN.LOG9105B
GET KIDPLAN.LOG9105C
GET KIDPLAN.LOG9105D
The notebook files will be forwarded to your mailbox.
Note: Some mailbox services have restrictions on the size of incoming mail. This may prevent you from receiving large notebook files. If this happens, contact your local postmaster for help.
Some email systems are unable to forward your return-address correctly to LISTSERV. If you suspect that this is the reason for lack of success, try the following commands:
GIVE KIDPLAN.LOG9105B TO Your-Correct-Return-Address
GIVE KIDPLAN.LOG9105C TO Your-Correct-Return-Address
GIVE KIDPLAN.LOG9105D TO Your-Correct-Return-Address
Making online conferences and task force meetings work, can be a challenge. Most of the dialog is based on the written word. The flow of information can be strong. This may cause an information overload for some members.
To overcome this, consider appointing a moderator-organizer for your online conference. This person:
Adds value by setting agendas; summarizing points; getting the discussion(s) back on track; moving on to the next point; mediating debate; maintaining address and member lists; acting as general sparkplug/motivator to keep things flowing by making sure that contributions are acknowledged, relevant points are noted, new members are welcomed, silent "Read-Only Members" are encouraged to participate, and the general atmosphere is kept appropriate to the goals of the conference/task force meeting.
Great online conferences do not just happen. Those set to get the meeting fired up and keep the discussion rolling must work hard on it.
The meeting's organization may depend on the number of participants, where they come from, the exclusivity of the forum, and the goal of the meeting.
In large meetings, with free access for outsiders, the best strategy may be to appoint a Moderator-Editor. This person
filters contributions, gathers new information, summarizes scattered contributions, does background research.
Filtering may be desirable when conferences are open to customers and media. Its main purpose, however, is to help participants cope with the absolute flow of information.
A conference can have an educational purpose. You can bring in someone who can add value by bringing experience and expertise to the group.
You also need someone to do the dirty jobs everyone expects to be done - but never notices until they are not. This person keeps the show running by serving as a benevolent tyrant, sheriff, judge, mediator, general scapegoat, and by playing a role in setting the general policy and atmosphere of the meeting.
Now, back to the 'normal' applications of the online resource.
Peter Drucker says (Forbes ASAP 8/29/94, p. 104):
"Most CEOs still believe that it's the chief information officer's job to identify the information he requires. This is, of course, a fallacy. The information officer is a toolmaker; the CEO is the tool user.... the information you need -- the really important information -- you cannot truly get from your information system. Your information system gives you inside information. But there are no results inside a business."
At the heart of any profit-making company is sales. No matter how wonderful the technology or how dedicated the manufacturing staff, without sales, the company fails. To sell products and services, you need sources for identifying potential buyers. With a little ingenuity, you can probably create your own list of targeted sales leads, simply using your modem.
How would cosmetics sell in Japan? What about sneakers in Mexico? In the age of the global business community, questions about expanding product services beyond national borders abound.
It is safe to claim that the best business opportunities are outside your company, in the external world.
Companies need to watch customers and markets, find technologies to help develop and build products, research new business actions, find new subcontractors and suppliers, people to hire, and persons to influence to boost sales.
In this marketing age, where sales calls cost hundreds of dollars and business-to-business marketers use the telephone or the mails to reach prospects, maintaining complete and accurate market lists is important.
There are many other questions: What are our most important customers and their key people doing? What new products are they promoting? Who are their partners? What else may influence their willingness to buy from us?
What prices are our major suppliers offering other buyers? Should we get other sources for supplies? What major contracts have they received recently? Will these influence their ability to serve our needs?
What new technologies are available now, and how are they being used by others?
Threats are the reverse side of opportunities. What are our competitors doing? What products and services have they launched recently? Are they successful? What are our competitors' weaknesses and strengths? What relationships do they maintain with our most important customers? How is their customer support functioning, and what methods are they using in their quality assurance?
Are new trade regulations being introduced in important foreign markets?
Each company has its own priorities when it comes to watching the external environment. The information needs differ depending on what products and services are being offered, the technological level of the company, the markets that it addresses, and more.
Needs and priorities also differ by department and person, for example depending on whether a user is the president, a marketing manager, product manager, sales person, or has a position in finance or production.
Remember your priorities when online. You cannot possibly capture and digest all information that is out there. Your basic problem is to find the right information in the right form at the right time.
Consider appointing an online manager. Select and empower a central manager to oversee the process of exploiting the online resource. A "make-things- happen" person, who can also be a contact point for upper management.
What kind of news about your company is being published? What do others say about your products and services? What kind of exposure do your new product announcements get in the media?
By subscribing to NetMind (http://www.netmind.com/html/url-minder.html), you can get a short notification by email each time an identified Web page changes. Alternatively, you can have the Web page sent you as html mail or mail attachment. Changes in file archives (FTP addresses in URL format), and gopher resources can also be tracked.
Hook it up to your competitors' What's New or Product Description pages to stay current on changes. The service is free.
NetMind also markets the Enterprise Minder software for installation on a company's intranet. It lets you monitor competitors, internal policy changes, engineering specifications, new product releases, almost anything that is online. The product also has a highlighting feature: It enables you to receive updates for just the portions of a web page that you think are the most important, all other changes for that particular web page will be ignored. Details at http://www.netmind.com/html/enterminderfaq.html.
The Informant is also a notification service that lets you track changes in information on the Web. At http://informant.dartmouth.edu/.
You can enter several sets of keywords, like "crypto+laws+freedom+speech." At given periodic intervals, the Informant will use the Alta Vista or Lycos search engines to find the ten Web pages that are most relevant to your keywords. If a new page appears in the top ten, or if one of the previous top ten pages has been updated, the Informant sends you a notification by email.
You can also enter URLs (Web addresses) that are of particular interest to you. At given periodic intervals, the Informant checks these Web pages, and sends you email if one or more of them have been updated.
Upon receipt of a notification, you can return to the Informant for a table of the Web pages that are new or updated. The service is free. Registration is required.
It does not take much effort to check one hundred different topics from multiple online sources on a daily basis. The computer will do it for you.
You do not have to read all stories as carefully as you would with printed material. Most experienced users just read what is important now, and save selected parts of the retrieved texts on local disks for later reference.
We handle printed material differently. Most of us make notes in the margins, underline, use colors, cut out pages and put into folders. These tricks are important, as it is so hard to find information in a pile of papers.
Not so with electronic information. With the right tools, you can locate information on your computer's disk in seconds.
In seven seconds, I searched the equivalent of 2000 pages of printed text for all occurrences of the combined search words 'SONY' and 'CD-ROM'! The search tool was a shareware program called LOOKFOR (see Chapter 14). It searched 4.2 megabytes on an 80486-based notebook computer. If you use an indexing program, the search may be completed even faster.
During a typical work day, my personal "databases" usually give me more direct value than what I have on paper, or can get online.
My disks contain megabytes of texts retrieved from various online services, but only what I have decided to keep. My personal databases contain more relevant information per kilobyte than the online databases that I am using. Searching the data on my disk often gives enough good hits to keep me from going online for more.
You will often get better results when searching your own subset of selected online databases, than when you go online to find information. It is usually easier and faster.
On the other hand, your in-house database will never be fully up-to-date. Too many things happen every day.
Also, the search terms used for your daily intake of news will never cover all future needs. Occasionally, you have to go online to get additional information for a project, a report, a plan.
Updating your database means going online regularly to find supplementary information.
Regular monitoring gives the highest returns, and is required
to get an edge over your competitors.
For beginners, the best strategy is often to start with the general, and gradually dig deeper into industry specific details. Let us review some good hunting grounds for information, and explain how to use them.
Too much to read and not enough time to read it? If you feel this way, you are not alone. Keeping up with critical developments that affect you and your business can be a daunting task. "Clipping" cannot do the reading for you, but it sure can help you gather and manage business information more efficiently.
Several online services offer 'clipping services'. They select the news that you want - 24 hours a day - from a continuous stream of stories from newspapers, magazines, news agencies and newsletters.
You select stories by giving the online service a set of search terms. The hits are sent to your electronic mailbox, for you to read at will.
Many make the news available as soon as they have been received by satellite. The delay before used to protect the interests of print media is disappearing. Online services usually deliver news sooner than print media, radio and television.
'Clipping' gives an enormous advantage. Few important details escape your attention, even if you are unable to go online daily. The stories will stay in your mailbox until you have read them.
Reference.COM is a personalized conference postings delivery service that covers over 150,000 newsgroups (Usenet), mailing lists, and Web forums. You subscribe by submitting keywords that describe your interests. Postings that match your profiles (based on content, no matter which conferences they fall into) will be sent you periodically via email.
You can access the service at http://www.reference.com. For instructions on the email interface, send a message with the word "help" in the message body to the address email-queries@Reference.COM.
The search profiles can include operators like AND, OR, AND NOT, WHERE ORGANIZATION CONTAINS, WHERE SUBJECT CONTAINS, and WHERE date <=>. You can adjust the frequency of delivery, the volume of articles, and the length of subscription.
One interesting application of the netnews service is to find which newsgroups may or may not be covering a subject area. When you have found the names, subscribe to those for direct inquiries, postings of queries, to converse with experts, etc.
ZD Net offers a free, personalized news service at http://www.pview.com, tailored to include only your favorite topics.
PointCast Inc. (http://www.pointcast.com) provides free personalized news from Reuters. S&P Comstock's stock ticker, SportsTicker, AccuWeather, and Variety. Select to receive news on any of 35 industry topics.
For a modest fee, NewsPage (see Chapter 9) will send you a customized daily news report right to your electronic doorstep. The report will contain the day's headlines and news-briefs relevant to your needs. To get the full text of a selected article, connect to the shown Web page and read it.
Clarinet allows the use of software filters to display only messages that include certain keywords, and can subscribe to subsets of the wire service offerings. Users' newsreaders can do some individualized filtering as well.
Knight-Ridder's News Alert (http://www.newsalert.com/) provides fee-based filtered information from AFX (European business news), A.M. Best, Business Wire, Comline Business News (Japanese business news), Federal News Service, Futures World News, Global Information Network, Knight Ridder Financial, PR Newswire, Sports Ticker, US Newswire, and other sources. Email and fax delivery available.
World News Connection (WNC) is a foreign news alert service from the U.S. Government. For a moderate fee, you get access to time sensitive news gathered from thousands of foreign media sources, including political speeches, television programs and radio broadcasts, and articles from newspapers, periodicals, and books.
Contents include unclassified military, political, environmental and sociological, scientific and technical data and reports from around the world. All the material is translated into English. Regional categories covered include: Central Eurasia, East Asia, Near East & South Asia, China, East Europe, West Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa. Note: U.S. information is not included. URL: http://wnc.fedworld.gov/.
Some subscription plans include clipping. Define the type of information in which you are interested. On a daily basis, WNC will review all articles being added to the service, identify those meeting your profile, and email them to your mailbox.
The San Jose Mercury News (California, USA) offers a low-cost news clipping and screening service called NewsHound (http://www.hound.com). For a modest monthly fee, relevance ranked articles are delivered to users' mailboxes filtered from sources like the New York Times News Service (http://nytsyn.com/), the Knight-Ridder Tribune News Service, the Knight- Ridder Tribune Business Wire, the Associated Press, Scripps-Howard News Service, PR Newswire, Business Wire, and the Kyodo News Service of Japan.
CARL (Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, U.S.A.) offers a table of contents alert service. Users with an "UnCover profile" may create a list of journal titles in which they are interested. When the next issue of any of those titles is entered into UnCover, the table of contents will automatically be emailed to them. Ordering an article is as easy as replying to the email message. Information: uncover@carl.org, and at http://uncweb.carl.org/.
CompuServe's Executive News Service (ENS) monitors over 8,000 stories daily from sources like Deutsche Press-Agentur (Germany), Kyodo News Service (Japan), ITAR/TASS (Russia), Xinhua News Agency (China), Pacific Rim News Service, The Washington Post, OTC News-Alert, Reuters Financial News Wire, Associated Press, UPI, Reuters World Report, IDG PR Service, Inter Press Service (IPS), Middle East News Network, European Community Report, and Dow Jones News Service.
One of them, Reuters, has 1,200 journalists in 120 bureaus all over the world. They write company news reports about revenues, profits, dividends, purchases of other companies, changes in management, and other important items for judging a company's results. They write regular opinions about Industry, Governments, Economics, Leading indicators, and Commerce.
Reuters also offers full-text stories from Financial Times and other leading European newspapers. Its Textline is a database with general and business news from some 2,000 publications in Western and Eastern Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. It includes Reuters' own news services, and translated abstracts of stories from some 17 languages. The database reaches back more than 10 years and is updated at around one million articles per year. (Textline is also available on Nexis, Data-Star, Clarinet, and Dialog.)
The IDG PR Service distributes high-tech related news gathered by the staffs of IDG's magazines. The InterPress Service covers Third World countries. The Middle East News Network integrates the contents of 28 information sources covering this region of Asia.
The Executive News Service lets you define up to three 'clipping folders'. Supply 'key phrases' that define your interests. These key phrases will be used for searching stories as they are sent. Hits will be 'clipped' and held in a folder for you to review at your convenience. When creating a clipping folder, you set an expiration date and specify how many days a clipped story is to be held.
To browse the contents of a folder, select it from the menu. Stories can be listed by headlines or leads. Select those you want to read, forward to others as email, or copy to another folder. Delete those that you do not need.
Defining key phrases is simple. The important thing is not to get too much, nor too little. General phrases will give many unwanted stories while too narrow phrases will cause you to miss pertinent stories. Example:
The phrase APPLE COMPUTERS will only clip stories that have the words APPLE and COMPUTERS next to each other. This may be too narrow. Specifying just APPLE or just COMPUTERS would be too broad. Entering APPLE + COMPUTERS is a better phrase since the words can appear anywhere in the story, and not necessarily next to each other.
ENS carries an hourly surcharge over base connect rates.
Dow Jones' Interactive has a comprehensive clipping service for business users. Sources include Financial Times' international business reports - grouped within primary industry segments.
Filtering may also be used when retrieving news through QMail gateways on BBSes. For example, I use the 1stReader program for communications with a Norwegian PCBoard BBS that carries hundreds of newsgroups and mailing lists from Usenet, Internet, BITNET, and other networks. By having 1stReader upload a list of keywords through the BBS' QMail door, all new messages containing these words or phrases from given conferences will be selectively retrieved, compressed, and downloaded. A powerful feature!
There are also clipping offerings on a host of other free and commercial services.
Many services do not offer clipping. On these, you can use various methods of regular, selective reading.
Many conferencing systems let you select messages to read by keywords.
BIX Keyword Indexer lets you search public conferences after a key word or phrase and reports hits. Then it offers you to review (or retrieve) messages of interest.
CompuServe's forums have efficient 'read selective' and 'quick scan' commands. Another trick is to limit your reading to specific message sections.
The high forum message volume is a special problem on this service. Old messages are regularly deleted to make room for new ones. (Often called "scroll rate.") Some popular forums do not keep messages for more than a couple of days before letting them go. You must visit often to get all new information.
Many bulletin boards can be told to store unread messages about given topics in a compressed transportation file. This file can then be retrieved at high speed. Special communication programs (often called offline readers) and commands are available to automate this completely.
Powerful scripts and offline reader programs (see Chapter 12) can do automatic selection of news stories based on the occurrence of keywords (for example, a company name) in headlines or the messages' text.
It is useful to dig, dig, and dig for occurrences of the same search words, but digging is not enough. Unless you periodically scan "the horizon," you risk missing new trends, viewpoints and other important information.
It can be difficult to find good sources of information that suits your needs. One trick is to watch the reports from your clipping services. Over time, you may discover that some sources bring more interesting stories than others. Take a closer look at these. Consider browsing their full index of stories regularly.
If your company plans exportation to countries in Asia, check out MARKET: ASIA PACIFIC on Brainwave for NewsNet. The newsletter is published monthly by W-Two Publications, Ltd., 202 The Commons, Suite 401, Ithaca, NY 14850, U.S.A. (phone: +1-607-277-0934). Annual print subscription rate: US$279.
The index itself may be a barometer of what goes on. Here is an example. Note the number of Words/Lines. Do these numbers tell a story?
July 1, 1993
Head # Headline Words /Lines
------ ---------------------------------------------------- ------------
1) THE PHILIPPINES IS AT A TURG POINT 616/78
2) CHINA AND KOREA WILL LEAD REGIONAL ECONOMIC BOOM 315/41
3) ASIAN COMPENSATION IS STILL LOW, BUT RISING QUICKLY 303/38
4) CONSUMER GOODS WON'T BE ALL THE CHINESE BUY 221/29
5) WOMEN BEAR THE BRUNT OF CAMBODIA'S TROUBLES 284/34
6) TAIWAN MAKES A MOVE TOWARD THE CASHLESS SOCIETY 243/29
7) TIPS ON MANAGING CULTURAL HARMONY IN ASIA 264/37
8) TAIWANESE BECOME MORE DISCERNING, HARDER TO REACH 217/27
9) DIRECT MARKETING HEADED FOR GROWTH IN SINGAPORE 205/27
10) TOURISM IN MALAYSIA WILL GROW 610/76
11) CHONGQING: FUTURE POWERHOUSE 2708/342
It is a good idea to visit Brainwave for NewsNet to gather intelligence. Review indexes of potentially interesting newsletters. Save them on your hard disk for future references. You never know when they may be of use.
The newsletters within computers and electronics bring forecasts of market trends, evaluation of hardware and software, prices, information about IBM and other leading companies. You will find stories about technological developments of modems, robots, lasers, video players, graphics, and communications software.
The Management section contains experts' evaluation of the economic climate with forecasts, information about foreign producers for importers, tips and experiences on personal efficiency, management of smaller companies, and office automation.
Other sections are Advertising and Marketing, Aerospace and Aviation, Automotive, Biotechnology, Building and Construction, Chemical, Corporate Communications, Defense, Entertainment and Leisure, Education, Environment, Energy, Finance and Accounting, Food and Beverage, General Business, Insurance, Investment, Health and Hospitals, Law, Management, Manufacturing, Medicine, Office, Publishing and Broadcasting, Real Estate, Research and Development, Social Sciences, Telecommunications, Travel and Tourism, Transport and Shipping.
Several newsletters focus on specific geographical areas, like:
OPEC Daily Bulletin is a daily news report on oil prices, exploration, and consumption.
Other newsletters focus on technology intelligence:
Reports on desktop manufacturing, computer graphics, flexible automation, computer-integrated manufacturing, and other technological advances that help increase productivity.
Reports on significant developments in high-performance materials, including alloys, metallic whiskers, ceramic and graphite fibers, and more. Concentrates on their fabrication, industrial applications, and potential markets.
Provides briefings on focused, strategic technologies that have been judged capable of making an impact on broad industrial fronts. Includes forecasts of marketable products and services resulting from the uncovered technology and its potential impact on industry segments. Advanced Coating & Surface Technology, Electronic Materials Technology News, Flame Retardancy News, High Tech Ceramics News, Innovator's Digest, Inside R&D, Japan Science Scan, New Technology Week, Optical Materials & Engineering News, Performance Materials, Surface Modification Technology News, Genetic Technology News, Battery & Ev Technology, and much more.
Internet users have access to thousands of sources of current government information from around the world -- census data, Supreme Court decisions, world health statistics, company financial reports, weather forecasts, United Nations information, daily government press briefings and much more.
For global demography and population information, check this Australian resource http://coombs.anu.edu.au/ResFacilities/DemographyPage.html.
At http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/globalpop/1-degree/, you can retrieve a population database depicting the worldwide distribution of population in a 1X1 latitude/longitude grid system. There are other global population databases at http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/globalpop/1-degree/description.html and http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idbprint.html.
World Competitiveness On-line (http://www.imd.ch/wcy_over.html) offers the World Competitiveness Yearbook published by International Institute for Management Development. The Yearbook aims to "capture in a single index the capacity of a country's economic structure to promote growth."
The Economist Group (United Kingdom) offers analysis and forecasts of the political, economic, and business environment in more than 180 countries. Access to the public areas of their web site at http://www.eiu.com/ requires a free registration. Their full-text publications, databases and other information are accessible by subscription only.
The European Union has a Market Access Sectoral and Trade Barriers Database at http://mkaccdb.eu.int.
Emerging Markets Companion (http://www.emgmkts.com/) is another window into the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe.
The IPE mailing list is for the discussion of international political economy. Topics include NAFTA, regional trading blocs, trade regimes, international debt, long cycles, historical world systems, EEC, currency and market crises, democracy and governance in Latin and South America, Africa and Asia, commodity negotiations. To subscribe, send the command "Sub IPE" to: mailserv@csf.colorado.edu.
On Usenet, check out the biz and clari.biz hierarchies of newsgroups for leads (biz = business postings). Many ClariNews groups cover the business and financial world, including these:
clari.biz.economy.world Covers economic news, including inflation,
unemployment and other economic news. (Validation
required for access to Clarinet.)
clari.biz.industry.agriculture The agriculture, fishing and forestry
industries.
clari.biz.world_trade News about international trade: GATT, free
trade and trade disputes.
The International Affairs Network offers a comprehensive hypertext guide to the worldwide network-accessible resources available to scholars in the study of International Affairs at http://www.pitt.edu/~ian/ianres.html. The guide contains pointers within such areas as: International Political Economy, Foreign Policy, Economic Development, Technology, Science, and Environmental Policy, International Law, Area Studies Resources, and more.
There is another interesting international law resource on the World Wide Web, at http://www.law.ecel.uwa.edu.au/intlaw/.
The Transport Web (http://www.transportweb.com) is an information service for the international transportation industry.
Information Access Company (http://www.gale.com) provides several reference and full-text databases targeted at businesses. Coverage includes news and information on companies, industries, products, markets, and applied technologies, and on subjects such as computers, marketing, management, health, law, aerospace, popular culture, and scholarly research.
PROMPT (Overview of Markets and Technology) is IAC's largest database. It provides international coverage of companies, markets and technologies in all industries.
The IAC databases are available on commercial online services such as CDP Online, DataTimes, Dialog, Data-Star, ESA (European Space Agency), Financial Times Profile (England), CompuServe, and others. They are regularly published on CD-ROM. (http://www.iacnet.com)
Users of Data-Star, LEXIS-NEXIS, and Reuters have access to international political and economic coverage from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Split into five regional parts across over 140 countries, Summary of World Broadcasts makes up a daily political document, with coverage of legislation, policy, labor issues and foreign relations. The Weekly Economic Report covers topics such as energy, agriculture, and transportation. (BBC is also at http://www.bbc.co.uk.)
ZiffNet offers the Business Database Plus through CompuServe. You can search in full-text stories from around 550 North American and international publications for industry and commerce (1993).
The articles are about sales and marketing ideas, product news, industry trends and analyses, and provide company profiles in areas such as agriculture, manufacturing, retailing, telecommunications, and trade. This is a partial list of the database's magazines:
Agribusiness Worldwide, Air Cargo World, Beverage World, Beverage World Periscope Edition, Business Perspectives, CCI-Canmaking & Canning International, CD-ROM Librarian, Chain Store Age - General Merchandise Trends, Coal & Synfuels Technology, Communication World, Communications Daily, Communications International, Consultant, Cosmetic World News, Dairy Industries International, Direct Marketing, Financial Market Trends, Financial World, Food Engineering International, Forest Industries, Gas World, Graphic Arts Monthly, The Printing Industry, High Technology Business, International Trade Forum, Investment International, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Marketing Research, Medical World News, OECD Economic Outlook, The Oil and Gas Journal, Oilweek, Petroleum Economist, Plastics World, Purchasing World, Restaurant-Hotel Design International, Seafood International, Supermarket Business Magazine, Training: the Magazine of Human Resources Development, World Economic Outlook, World Oil.
Trade Show Central is a large searchable database of international trade shows (http://www.tscentral.com/).
The Business Dateline contains news from more than 150 regional business publications in the United States and Canada. If you have a niche market, chances are that the Predicast newsletters cover it (Dow Jones).
Market research reports from Frost & Sullivan are available through Data- Star. It produces over 250 market reports each year, in 20 industrial sectors. These reports cover results of face-to-face interviews with manufacturers, buyers and trade association executives, supplemented by a search and summary of secondary sources.
International Business Practices is full text of a U.S. Department of Commerce reference work that provides overviews of import regulations, free trade zones, foreign investment policy, intellectual property rights, tax laws and more in 117 countries. Check this resource out at
http://WWW.UMSL.EDU/services/library/tjldoc.html
Brainwave for NewsNet has the Worldwide Business Practices Report. It offers monthly detailed information on such country-specific topics as business customs and protocol, negotiating tactics and bargaining tips, marketing strategies travel recommendations, local government regulations, social interaction and etiquette, safety and health issues.
You should also take a look at the continent related pointers listed in Chapter 4 and 9 !
The Syndicate (http://www.moneypages.com/syndicate/finance/foreign.html) is filled with links to stock exchanges and financial information around the world. Besides the usual United States links, you'll find links to countries like Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and countries in Latin America.
The Italian FINANCE AREA page (http://www.tsi.it/finanza/index.html) is another good source for global finance information. For links to banks around the world, check http://www.gwdg.de/~ifbg/bank_2.html. GATTs World Trade Resource Directory Index is at
http://www.gatts.com/gatts_docs/World_Trade.HTML
The Handbook of International Economic Statistics 1997 provides basic worldwide statistics for comparing the economic performance of major countries and regions. Produced by the US Central Intelligence Agency: http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/hies97/
The AINTACC-L mailing list (at listproc@scu.edu.au) hosts discussions about international accounting.
The Foreign and International Law Resources on the Internet page (at http://www.law.cornell.edu/library/forin.html) contains a long list of annotated pointers within international law, and topical resources.
United Nations (UN) is at http://www.undp.org. This site carries UN DPI Press Releases, General Assembly, Security Council and ECOSOC resolutions, and more. ILO, the International Labor Organization, is at http://www.ilo.org.
United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) offers several searchable databases at http://apps.fao.org/lim500/agri_db.pl. Their FAOSTAT Database contains extensive agricultural data from many countries. Data is provided for production, trade, commodity supply and demand balances, population, land use, and fisheries.
For more, try the Official WEB Locator for the United Nations System of Organizations (at: http://www.unsystem.org/) is needed. Categories on their home page include: Alphabetical Index, Official Classification, What's New, Frequently Requested Information, Related Information and Other International Organizations.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is at http://www.who.ch, The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) at http://www.unicef.org, and UNESCO at http://www.unesco.org.
OECD (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) is at http://www.oecd.org/. The organization is a forum permitting governments of 29 industrialized countries to study and formulate policies in economic and social spheres. It offers economic data on the members states, analysis of nonmember countries, and links to statistical resources on the net.
Usenet has clari.world.organizations with news of The United Nations, the Organization of American States, the Council on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and other major international organizations. (Validation required for access to Clarinet.)
For more links to international organizations, point your browser at http://www.lawresearch.com/v2/Ciorgs.htm.
Below, there are many pointers to country-specific information, sorted by continent. To get more, try this trick:
Search the Internet using Alta Vista (http://www.altavista.digital.com/. See Chapter 10). Compose a query that contains the international standard top-level code for the country in question (click on link in Appendix 6 for a list of country codes). Insist that the code be present in the URLs of found resources. Qualify further by adding other words or phrases if your query gives too many hits.
Example: +url:.kr
"+url:" insists that the preceding string be found in the URL. "KR" is the top-level code for Korea. This code is often found at the end of the location part of URLs pointing to this country, unless the server uses a non-country specific code (like .net or .com). This query is likely to include http://www.kois.go.kr in your hit list. It is the Web address of Korea's Information Ministry.
Expect the two character code to exist in URLs pointing to resources in other countries also. However, the result is usually good. For example, MN is the code for Mongolia. Using "+url:.mn" in your query will also find URLs like http://www.an.cc.mn.us/depts/he/raynauds.html.
Brainwave for NewsNet has several interesting newsletters
Africa Intelligence Report
Africa News On-Line
- political, economic and cultural developments
Country Risk Guides: Sub-Saharan Africa
Country Risk Guides: Mid-East & North Africa
Monthly Regional Bulletin - Southern Africa,
PRS-Forecasts: Mid-East & North Africa
PRS-Forecasts: Sub-Saharan Africa
Southern Africa Business Intelligence
The Information Bank on African Development Studies (IBADS) is a mailing service provided by the Africa Technical Department at the World Bank. Its aim is to send out information about development studies on Sub-Saharan Africa. Investext (http://www.investext.com) brings regular reports about activity in the African region.
IBADS offers an index and a list of abstracts of studies undertaken by the Africa Technical Department at the World Bank. It will eventually be expanded to include full-text reports, and development studies undertaken by other units in the World Bank and other development, academic, and research organizations worldwide. Subscribe by sending the following command
Subscribe IBADS First-Name Last-Name
to listserv@tome.worldbank.org. On separate lines, add information about specialty, organization, address, and subject of interest. The World Bank is at http://www.worldbank.org/.
For leads in South Africa, start with ExiNet. This South African trade information resource (http://www.exinet.co.za/) has information on South African Exporters, South African Trade Fairs and Exhibitions, Travel and Tourism, South African Publications, South African Property, and South African Demographics: A Regional Summary.
ExiNet boasts a database of over 70,000 South African companies. Mail to exinet@aztec.co.za for information.
Other South African sources on the Web includes: The Africa Commercial home page in Cape Town (http://www.africa.com/), and Compustat on the URL: http://www.os2.iaccess.za/.
African Census data is at http://lexis.pop.upenn.edu/world/africa. See http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/globalpop/africa/ for the African Population Database. The South African politics online page is at
http://unpsun3.cc.unp.ac.za/UNPDepartments/politics/saonline.htm
The SUDAN-L mailing list (on listserv@emuvm1.cc.emory.edu) is where you will find information and sources of information about Sudan.
If you want to check out information servers on the African continent, check http://www.cnuce.cnr.it/RINAF/.
JETRO, the Japan External Trade Organization, provides Japanese government procurement information from Kampo, the governments official journal, alongside economic information about Japan, at
http://www.jetro.go.jp/
One hyperlink points at "Japan Economic Trends, Industry, Markets, Business Practices." This page contain such things as First Steps in Exporting to Japan, Doing Business in Japan, and The Japanese Consumer.
The QUALITY mailing list (on listserv@pucc.princeton.edu) is for Total Quality Management (TQM) in Manufacturing & Service Industries. The topics for discussion include JIT, ISO 9000, Deming and JIS (the latter two are Japanese Quality Standards). Check out the mailing list's archive for files of interest.
Usenet has comp.research.japan about The nature of research in Japan. (Moderated).
Also, see the WWW Organization's Virtual Library, and check out
gopher://gan1.ncc.go.jp/11/JAPAN/Economy
JIST (http://www.jst.go.jp/EN/JICST/ServiceGuide/), The Japan Information Center of Science and Technology, offers a range of commercial English language databases in the broad spectrum of science, technology and medicine (since 1975).
Orbit has an English language database of Japanese technology. It contains abstracts of articles, patents and standards from more than 500 Japanese magazines. Reuters offers the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's best-selling daily newspaper. Tradstat (Data-Star/Dialog) offers Japanese import and export statistics.
Dow Jones Interactive brings full-text stories from the Japan Economic Newswire (Kyodo News International), which covers Japanese company, industry and financial markets; government, defence and science news. (On Dialog as File 612.) It also brings full-text stories from many other international publications including New Era Japan, New Food Products in Japan, New Materials Japan, and PDS's Japan Auto Industry Survey, Power Asia.
Business Database Plus (CompuServe) has IDC Japan Report, Inc., Japan Economic Newswire, and Kyodo. CompuServe's Japan Forum has a Business & Industry section, and more. You may also find information about Japan in the International Forum.
Brainwave for NewsNet has the following newsletters and services:
Comline Japan Daily: Biotechnology Comline Japan Daily: Computers Comline Japan Daily: Electronics Comline Japan Daily: Industry Automation Comline Japan Daily: Telecommunications Comline Japan Daily: Transportation Japan Digest (business briefings) Japan Computer Industry Scan Japan Consumer Electronics Scan Japan Economic Institute (JEI) Report Japan Energy Scan Japan Policy and Politics Japan Semiconductor Scan Japan Science Scan Japan Transportation Scan Japan Weekly Monitor Japanese Telecommunications Scan Jiji Press Ticker Service Kyodo News Service New Era: Japan Tokyo Financial Wire
Comline's industry news covers several hundred Japanese journals and newspapers. It is also available in Predicast's Newsletter Database.
For science and technology, consider the JICST-E file on STN.
The Investext database has English language profiles of thousands of Japanese companies sourced from Teikou, Japan's largest business credit agency (http://www.investext.com) .
Kompass Online has information about Japanese companies. LEXIS-NEXIS, Dialog, NiftyServe, PC-VAN, and G-Search have the Teikoku Databank, with directory and income information about over one million Japanese firms.
ArabNet (http://www.arab.net/) focuses on the Arab world in the Middle East and North Africa, and offers links and information about Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, UAE, Yemen.
The official Saudi Arabia page is at http://www.saudi.net/.
The Israel Industry R&D Information System (MOP) have an information server at http://www.matimop.org.il/. There's a weekly newsletter called "The Arab Press on Israel" at http://www.arutz7.jer1.co.il/meiri.htm.
The Israel Information Service is at http://www.israel.org/ (some documents are in French and Spanish). Choices include Basic Statistics, The Economy, Culture, Communications and Media, and Basic Laws and Legal Issues. Information is also available by email to ask@israel-info.gov.il
CompuServe's International Trade Forum has an Africa/Middle East section. Business Database Plus (also on CompuServe) has Israel Business, MEED Middle East Economic Digest, Middle East Agribusiness.
Kompass Online has information about companies in Israel.
AFX Asia (http://www.indoexchange.com/afx) delivers 400+ subscription- based Asian financial news stories from all of Asia each day. Operated by providers such as Financial Times Group, AFP, Nikkei, and Australian Association Press.
Asia Pulse, a real-time commercial intelligence wire designed for corporate users, can be accessed at http://www.infomarket.ibm.com/. It delivers information about Asian infrastructure, private investments, government procurement, company and industry developments, politics, exports, retail trade, and regulatory issues. Covers 50 industries in over 20 countries.
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) home page is at http://www.apecsec.org.sg with information about the 18 current members' economies, calendar of APEC activities, press releases, and more.
The Asian Development Bank is at http://www.asiandevbank.org/, and Asian Buying Consortium at http://www.abcflash.com.
The Far Eastern Economic Review Interactive Edition (Hong Kong) is available for free at http://www.feer.com/. They focus on Asian current affairs, business, economies and investment. Straits Times (Singapore) is at http://www.asia1.com.sg/straitstimes/.
Dun & Bradstreet (http://www.dnd.com) has hard-to-find company information on developing markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia.
Tradstat has import and export statistics on Hong Kong and Taiwan. Asia, Inc., the Hong Kong published business magazine, has an electronic version at http://www.asia-inc.com. It contains articles of Asia's executives and their enterprises, daily financial information, and more.
The Hong Kong Trade Development Council (at http://www.tdc.org.hk) offers comprehensive trade and business information on Hong Kong and Mainland China, online trade enquiry, trade fair registration, and more.
Singapore Business Times is at http://www.asia1.com.sg/biztimes.
Dialog's ASIA-PACIFIC DATABASE covers business and economics in Asia and the Pacific. It contains over 80,000 references from newspapers, magazines and other sources in North America and international.
The Asia-Pacific Dun's Market Identifiers on Dialog is a directory listing of about 250,000 business establishments in 40 Asian and Pacific Rim countries. Dow Jones Interactive has the Asian Wall Street Journal. Reuters' Textline on Dialog provides good business and general coverage of the region.
Brainwave for NewsNet has the following newsletters and services:
Asian Aviation News
Asian Economic News
Asian Infrastructure Monthly
Asian Political News
AsiaPacific Space Report
Country Risk Guide: Asia & The Pacific
Market: Asia Pacific
Power Asia
PRS Forecasts: Asia & The Pacific
Telenews Asia
Vietnam Market Watch
Xinhua English Language News Service
Inter Press Service International (IPS) provides regular updates on
the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and ASEAN.
The ELC file on LEXIS-NEXIS contains financial and marketing information on some 9,000 Southeast Asian corporations (1993). Kompass Online has information about companies in Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan. Investext (http://www.investext.com) also monitors the region closely.
To join CORMOSEA (Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia), send a subscription request to Kent Mulliner <MULLINER@OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU>.
Textile Asia and Bisnis Indonesia are in the Globalbase database. This source offers around 350 trade journals, newspapers, and business magazines spanning 40 countries (1993). On Data-Star (Label EBUS), Dialog (File 583), FT Profile (Label INF), and others. It has 87 Asian publications (1994). The coverage includes The Australian, Japan Times, Asia Computer Weekly, Asia Money & Finance, South China Morning Post, Korea Economic Weekly.
The ABI/Inform business database (UMI/Data Courier) contains abstracts and full-text articles from the Asia Pacific Journal of Management, and Business Korea.
CompuServe has the Australian/New Zealand Company Library, the Asia/OZ/NZ and the Africa/Middle East sections of the International Trade Forum. Also, check out the Australian Associated Press Online newswire service.
China Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC), a major component of China's national economy, are at http://www.moftec.gov.cn. Has Essentials of China's Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, China Trading Opportunities, and more. In English and Chinese.
China Dimensions (at http://plue.sedac.ciesin.org/china/) offers China Administrative Regions GIS Data, GB Codes for the Administrative Divisions of the People's Republic of China, Fundamental GIS: Digital Chart of China with layers for roads, railroads, drainage system, contours, populated places and urbanized areas, access to the China Census of Population, Data on Population and Agriculture, Data on Provincial Economic Yearbooks, China Micro-Economic Database, Agricultural Statistics, Data on Hospitals and Epidemiology Stations, and the Priority Program for China's Agenda 21. Many data sets are available at the county level.
China Import/Export News is a weekly newsletter of international business information about import/export to/from China and the Pacific Rim. The newsletter is distributed by the mailing list CHINA-LINK. Subscribe by email to listserv@ifcss.org.
For details about how to subscribe to the China News Digest, send the word INFO to cnd-info@cnd.org. On the Web, they're at http://www.cnd.org/
For business news from China, weekdays, check out Daily China Headline News. Send the command SUB HEADLINE to listserv@asiainfo.com to subscribe. Here is a sample news item:
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Ref. No: 94061501
Newsgroup: General News and news in other industries
Category: Marketing, Investment
Title: Automobile plastics mart bode well
Date: Wednesday, June 15, 1994
Keywords: Auto plastic;Market analysis
It is estimated that one domestic made automobile use plastics about
40-45kg. China will turn out 2 million automobiles by the year of 2000.
This year, the automobile plastic requirement is 28,000 ton. Comparing
the production, the auto plastic will be undersupplied.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
For General Information about the service, mail to INFO@AsiaInfo.com. Dialog has Chinese Patent Abstracts in English.
China Business News (http://www.business-china.com/news/index.htm) publishes updated economic news to those into doing business with China.
Reports on World Bank Projects in China are at
http://www.ait.ac.th/Asia/wb-reps/wb-cn.html
Here, you will find a China Country Economic Memorandum and GNP per capita. There are reports on Industrial crop marketing, Highway development, Power sector, Urban environment services, Disease prevention, Financial sector development, Railway development, Education, Gas development, Forest resource development, Telecommunications, and more.
A WWW service for the Chinese community exists at http://www.edu.tw/. Most of the local texts support Chinese BIG5 only.
Kompass Online has information about companies in China.
There is a comprehensive Web site about India, it's economy and industry, called the Indian Economy Overview, at http://www.m-web.com/. The site has complete coverage of the recent Indian Financial Budget, including full text, live coverage, commentary, analysis and reactions.
The non-profit National Centre for Trade Information (NCTI), whose aim is to promote "trade, investment and technology flow among different countries," is at http://www.nic.in/ncti/. For statistical information about economy, population, etc., see http://www.nic.in/gistnic/.
Check IndiaWorld at http://www.indiaworld.co.in/open/. Their offerings include Indian news, business and entertainment information with links to India Daily, khoj daily, The Indian Express and The Financial Express, Madhya Pradesh Chronicle, India Trade Daily, and more.
The Economic Times, the largest selling business daily in India, is at http://www.economictimes.com/.
Kompass Online has information about Indian companies.
The Asian Studies area of the WWW Organization's international directory of networked research and educational resources (WWW Virtual Library) can be reached at http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html. It tracks information and research resources (ftp, gopher, wais, www) for Burma, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam.
Check http://coombs.anu.edu.au/asia-www-monitor.html to follow developments regularly.
Eurasia Research Center (http://eurasianews.com/erc/homepage.htm) offers links to news and other resources on the Balkans, Baltic States, Central Europe, the Caucasus, formerly Soviet Central Asia, Russia, Belarus, Iran, Ukraine, Moldavia, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The EXPORT-IMPORT-INVEST Vietnam - Business Directories pages on the Web are at http://www.cgtd.com/global/vietnam.html. Texts in English, French, Spanish, and German.
Organizacion de los Estados Americanos (OEA) has an information server at http://www.oas.org/shomepag.htm (in Spanish and English). Their "Programs and Issues" page gathers information on current OAS activities in the areas of trade, democracy, environment, human rights, drug abuse control, telecommunications and information infrastructure, and others. Every country in the Americas is a member of the OAS (except Cuba).
Latin America Related Information Service is at http://lanic.utexas.edu/. You can also reach it by email to gopher@lanic.utexas.edu, and by telnet to telnet://lanic.utexas.edu (login: lanic).
Tradstat has import and export data on Brazil and Argentina. For South American census data, try http://lexis.pop.upenn.edu/world/latin_america.
The Latin American Data Base (LADB) has SourceMex (economic news and analysis on Mexico), Chronicle of Latin American Economic Affairs (reports on trade policy, privatization, monetary policy, and macro-economic figures), and Central America Update. The database is available by telnet://ladb.unm.edu (user name and password required), and through Dialog, Dow Jones Interactive, and BRS. For information, check http://ladb.unm.edu/.
The Caribbean Economy mailing list is on CARECON (listserv@yorku.ca).
RNP - Rede Nacional de Pesquisa (National Research Network) in Brazil has a WWW server at http://www.rnp.br/ with links to most ftp, gopher and WWW servers in Brazil. Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial offers Brazilian patents data on URL: http://www.bdt.org.br/bdt/inpi/.
Brainwave for NewsNet has these newsletters
Brazil Service Country Risk Guide: THE AMERICAS EcoCentral: Central American Economy & Sustainable Development Environment Watch: Latin America Latin America Intelligence Report Latin America Opportunity Report Latin American Telecom Report Market: Latin America Mexico Service. Mexico Trade and Law Reporter Notisur - Latin American Affairs PRS Forecasts: South America
Investext (http://www.investext.com) monitors the region closely. Dow Jones has Mexico Service, InterAmerican Opportunities, and Latin America Opportunity Report.
CompuServe's International Trade Forum has a South & Central America message section.
Those exporting to the EEC need to master languages like German, French, Italian, and Spanish besides having a working knowledge of English. Conversation is the easy part. The problem is writing, and especially when the task is to translate technical expressions to the languages used within the Common Market.
Check out ECHO's Eurodicautom multilingual online dictionary for help. It contains translations of scientific and technical terms, contextual phrases and abbreviations in all official languages of the European Union. You can choose between Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. URL: http://www2.echo.lu/echo/databases/eurodicautom/en/eu92-hom.html
Select a source language for simultaneous translation. The translation is word-for-word, but may be put in the correct context if required.
The Europe Homepage (http://europa.eu.int/) offers multi-lingual information on the European Union's goals and policies. EUROPA represents EU's institutions, and is run by the European Commission. Here are also links to official documents from the Union, publications, online services, statistics, news, and other Web servers of the area.
The Common Market's free database service, I*M-EUROPE (Information Market Europe), is set up to "support the actions of DGXIII of the European Commission in stimulating the European electronic information services market and multimedia content industries." It offers information on topics such as the Telematics Applications Programme, the INFO2000 programme, Task Force Multimedia Educational Software, and links for more about EU's organizations and programmes. At: http://www.echo.lu/.
The European Commission's CORDIS (Community Research and Development Information Service) is a database of all European Community information related to Research and Technological Development programmes.
At http://www.cordis.lu/, you're offered multi-lingual searches in databases on topics such as News, Programmes for finding opportunities in your research areas, Projects for Who is doing What, Results for exploring Innovation, Partners for your Business Research, Publications for Key R&D, Published Items, Contacts to People who Can Help, Acronyms relevant to Community R&D, Understanding EU R&D decision making, and more. Here are also links to R&D in the European Union.
The EC's DANTE (http://www.dante.net/) provides advanced international computer network services for the European research community. The WISE Information Board on R&D Activities in the European Union is at http://www.igd.fhg.de/wise/.
ACTS NewsClips is a bi-weekly newsfeed about developments in the European Commission's Advanced Communications Technologies and Services programme. You can read it at http://www.at.infowin.org/ACTS/IENM/Newsclips/, or sign up for deliveries by electronic mail.
EUbusiness (http://www.eubusiness.com/) provides daily overviews of business news and information about the European Union. Topics include Agriculture, Competition, Consumers, Employment/Training, Eastern Europe, Energy, Environment, Food/Drink, Living/Working, Media/communication, Pharmaceuticals/health, Social policy, Trade/external relations, Transport, Economy, EMU, Tenders, Facts/Figures, Finance, Markets update, and much more.
The Zagreb Stock Exchange is at http://www.zse.hr/. The Vienna Stock market (Austria) is at http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/cgi-bin/boerse1.pl. The language is German.
For economics, check out http://netec.wustl.edu/NetEc.html for access to BibEc (bibliography of working research papers), and WoPEc (a collection of working papers).
The European Business Directory (http://www.europages.com/) offers economic analyses and indicators on the main European markets, and practical information for doing business in Europe. Information is available in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Dun & Bradstreet (http://www.dnb.com) offers company profiles of more than two million European companies.
Brainwave for NewsNet also has the following newsletters and services
Agence France-Presse International news Aviation Europe Coal UK Country Risk Guide: Europe EC Energy Monthly Environment Watch: Western Europe European Community: Business Forecast European Energy Report European Media Business & Finance European Savings Market European Venture Capital Journal Financial Times Full Text German Business Scope Market: Europe News From France North Sea Letter North Sea Rig Forecast Northern Ireland News Service Opportunities Briefing: Central Europe Power Europe PRS Forecasts: Western Europe Today's Financial Times The Week In Germany West Europe Intelligence Report
For up-to-the-minute news from England, try the Press Association Online's wires at http://www.pa.press.net/. The British IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) are at http://www.iee.org.uk/. Search their IEE Library Online Catalog. In 1996, it held some 65,000 books and pamphlets covering all aspects of electrical engineering, electronics, manufacturing and control engineering, computing, IT, and telecommunications.
On CompuServe, enter GO PAO to get to the Press Association service. The UK Company Library on CompuServe has financial information about more than 1.2 million British companies from sources like Extel Cards, ICC British Co. Directory and Kompass UK.
ZiffNet's Business Database Plus on CompuServe has Market Research Europe.
The ELC file on LEXIS-NEXIS contains financial and marketing information on some from 45,000 European corporations (1993). NEXIS-LEXIS also offers La Vie Francaise, a French-language weekly magazine on business and investments. La Stampa, the third largest newspaper in Italy, is available in full text. While the language is Italian, indexing by subject and type is provided in English as well.
Tradstat (on Data-Star/Dialog) has import and export trade statistics on all major European countries collected by European national statistical agencies and international bodies.
Data-Star is strong on information of Europe:
European Community: Tenders Electronic Daily, a database of European Community contract offers. Its Textline is an excellent source of information about European companies. CELEX (European Community Law). European Chemical News. Dun & Bradstreet European Marketing File. DRT European Business Reports. Business Opportunities in Europe. ABC EUROPE: European Export Industry. Euromonitor Market Reports. Euromonitor Market Direction. Spicers Centre for Europe - European Community Law. Spearhead - UK Analysis of EC Law.Austria: Creditreform - Austrian Companies. Hoppenstedt - Austria. KREDITSCHUTZVERBAND - Austrian Companies.
Benelux: the Belgian newspaper De Financieel Ekonomische Tijd (in Flemish), INFOTRADE - Belgian Company Financial Data, Hoppenstedt - Benelux.
France: The FRFF/FREFF files hold balance sheets of over 335,000 French companies (1994). Telefirm - French Companies Register. French Companies - Full Financial Data. Firmimport/Firmexport - French Importers/Exporters. Le Monde. SCRL French Companies Financial Profiles.
Germany: German Business & Industry Directory, German Business Opportunities, Aerzte Zeitung Online, BDI German Industry, Biotechnology Information. Creditreform - German Companies. German Buyers' Guide. EcoRegister - German Company Registrations. EcoNovo - German Companies in Bundesanzeiger. German Business Statistics. German Company Financial Data. FINF-TEXT - German Company News. Hoppenstedt - Germany. ManagementInfo Wirtschaft. Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Wer Gehoert zu Wem - Who Belongs to Whom. Who Supplies What? (Germany & Austria). ZVEI Electro/Electronics Buyers' Guide.
Italy: Il Sole 24 Ore, L'Impresa, and Il Mundo Economica in Italian. Italian Company Profiles - Financial. MAST - Market Structure and Trends in Italy. Sistema Ditte Operanti con l'Estero. La Stampa.
Switzerland: In its Swiss News Agency wire service, you have a choice of French or German. Credit Suisse Information on the Swiss economy. Swiss Educational Documentation. Neue Zuercher Zeitung. Serials in Swiss Libraries. Swiss Newswire. Societe Generale de Banque - Banking. Schweizer Handelszeitung. ELSA Swiss Sportwire. Dun & Bradstreet Swiss Companies Dun & Bradstreet. Swiss Companies Full Financial Data.
Scandinavia: Trademarks and applications for Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
United Kingdom: Key British Enterprises Financial Performance. ICC Full- text UK Company Reports ICC Directory of UK Companies ICC UK Financial Datasheets. JordanWatch - UK Companies. Pharm-line - UK Pharmacy. British Trademarks. UK Importers.
On Dow Jones Interactive , you can search full text articles from Wall Street Journal Europe, Agence France-Presse, the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, the Guardian, and others from the United Kingdom.
Country reports, Financial Focus, Political focus, and International Economic Outlook from the Union Bank of Switzerland, and more can be found in the Quest Economics Database (QED) on Data-Star, FT PROFILE, and Genios.
Investext offers a series of stockbroker research reports on European companies and sectors from around 400 contributors based on the continent. Their reports offer detailed analysis, important financial data, and forecasts on everything from the mayor players to the small manufacturing firms. Investext is at http://www.investext.com, and it is also available through Data-Star, LEXIS-NEXIS, Dialog, Dow Jones Interactive, and other redistributors.
The German Company Library (on CompuServe) offers information about some 48,000 German companies from databases like Credit Reform and Hoppenstedt's Directory of German Companies. Its European Company Library contains information about over two million companies in the area.
LEXIS-NEXIS brings news and background information about companies and the different countries in Europe. Their Worldwide Companies database contains company profiles, balance sheets, income statements, and other financial data on the largest companies in 40 countries.
LEXIS-NEXIS also has Hoppenstedt German Trade Associations directory, four more newsletters from the Europe Information Service: Europe Energy, Europe Environment, Transport Europe and European Insight, a weekly brief on European Community-related happenings.
GBI offers more than 100 databases and two million documents on companies, markets and business literature (1994).
LEXIS-NEXIS has databases with information about English and French law, and other law material from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland and North America.
Their Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory has information on over 700,000 lawyers and law firms worldwide. The directory can be used for referrals, selection of associate counsel, and evaluation of competitive counsel.
Check out Kompass EUROPE when planning exports to the EEC. Its database contains details about companies in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Sweden and Norway. (On Dialog) Try GENIOS for more on Germany. The German Federal Government is at http://www.government.de.
ILINK has the EEC-I conference (Discussion about the European Common Market). FT Profile offers full-text searches (and a clipping service) in stories from Financial Times. The database is being updated daily at 00:01.
ZiffNet's Business Database Plus has Agra Europe, Belgium: Economic and Commercial Information, British Plastics & Rubber, British Telecom World, The Economist, Erdol und Kohle, Erdgas, Petrochemie: Hydrocarbon Technology, EuroBusiness, Euromoney, Europe 2000, European Cosmetic Markets, European Rubber Journal, Report on the Austrian Economy, Royal Bank of Scotland Review, swissBusiness.
The International Trade Forum on CompuServe has a European Community section. CompuServe also has the Associated Press France en Ligne wire service.
Globalbase has Nouvel Economiste among its many offerings. Questel offers access to 250,000 logos and images of French trademarks (1993), and patent information from several European countries. Their URL is:
http://www.questel.orbit.com/patents/
Dialog, Orbit, and STN are also great sources for patents data.
Users of cc:Mail throughout Europe can receive business news from First! for cc:Mail (tel: +44 491 579 600) directly into their mail system. The service scans some 12,000 stories daily before automatically providing customers with those relevant to their needs. Agence Presse France is among the sources.
Before meeting with people from Norsk Hydro, go online to get recent news about the company (Chapter 9). It will only take a couple of minutes. What you find may be important for the success of your meeting.
If you know the names of your most important competitors, use their names as keywords for information about recent contracts, joint venture agreements, products (and their features), and other important information.
Kompass ONLINE offers information about over 180,000 companies and 34,000 products in Scandinavia, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and Great Britain. The information is presented in the local language of the different countries.
Kompass is used by easy menus. You can search by
The database is available through Affaersdata (Sweden). New users pay a one time fee of around US$85. Searching costs around US$3.00 per minute.
Affaersdata in Sweden also offers the Swedish-language service "Export- Nytt," which brings short news stories about export/import from all over the world. Information providers are the Swedish Export Council, the Norwegian Export Council, and the Suomen Ulkomaankauppaliitto in Finland.
The TYR database on the Finnish service VIEXPO (tel.: +358 67 235100) offers information about 2,500 companies in the Vaasa and Oulu regions with addresses, phone numbers, contact persons, main products, revenues, and SIC industry classification codes.
CompuServe's International Trade Forum has the NonEEC Europe & CIS section. Business Database Plus has The Finnish Trade Review.
There are so many sources focusing on North America, and we have already mentioned several. This section is therefore kept intentionally short.
The U.S. Commerce Department's Economic and Statistics Administration offers STAT-USA (http://www.stat-usa.gov/), which provides statistical information on economy, energy, foreign trade, business, and industry. Fee- based subscription required.
The White House is at http://www.whitehouse.gov, the subject index of online government information at http://www.fedworld.gov/#usgovt, and The Government Information Locator Service at
http://info.er.usgs.gov/gils/index.html
The National Technical Information Service provides access to more than 100 U.S. Government operated bulletin boards and online systems:
http://www.fedworld.gov
Official Gazette, a weekly publication from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is offered at http://www.micropat.com. It covers new patents and trademarks, expired and reinstated patents, re-examination and re-issue applications, announcements, changes in procedures and requests for comments. Its archive contains every issue from the last 20 years.
You can search a US Patent Database at http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/. Data includes bibliographic information about the patents, claims, reference and abstract information. You can view the images, and order patents online.
The EDS Shadow Patent Office's email patent search service is on spo_patent@spo.eds.com. Send the word "help" in the body of your text for instructions. SPO is also on http://www.spo.eds.com/patent.html.
A daily news service on global patenting activities are available from patent-news-request@world.std.com.
Statistics Canada is the country's national statistical agency. It is at http://www.statcan.ca. Kompass Canada is also an interesting source.
PRESSline is a database of press releases, pictures and logos that is available free of charge. (http://www.pressline.com) Companies and organizations are charged a small fee for storing their releases. In English, German, and French.
Information on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is available from several sites, including http://www.nafta.net/.
Usenet has misc.invest.canada (Investing in Canadian financial markets).
InfoMarket (at http://www.fe.msk.ru/lat/infomarket/ewelcome.html) brings Russian Securities Market News in English, and is an invaluable source for Russian commercial financial information.
LEXIS-NEXIS, Data-Star, FT Profile and Reuters have many interesting sources.
DJNR offers full text from BizEkon News, and others. Through DATATIMES, you can research English-language versions of The Budapest Sun and the Prague Post.
Subscribe to the Prague Financial Monitor newsletter by sending an email to prague-fm-request@eunet.cz. Put the command SUBSCRIBE in the body of your mail. You can also check it out at http://www.eunet.cz/.
The Central Europe Online Navigator (http://www.centraleurope.com/) publishes daily news an industry reports on Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Poland, and Russia. Includes political and economical analyses.
Click on telnet://ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu, and login as ex-ussr to access a database of xUSSR-related files.
The European Information Network, a Prague-based Web publishing company, posts daily Russian news reports at http://www.russiatoday.com/. The site offers a databank of information about election laws, Russian government addresses and the Russian constitution.
There is a Russia-American World Wide Web Server at the URL locator: http://www.friends-partners.org/friends/.
Maximov News - Information And Guide To The Russian Federation - offers full-text news, contact and information sources from the former Soviet Union. At http://www.maximov.com/. In English and Russian.
The St. Petersburg Business Journal (monthly) is at http://www.spb.su/.
The EKONOMIKA mailing list on listproc@pub.vse.cz is about Czech economy. The language is primarily Czech, but English is accepted too.
The Financial Izvestia weekly, the joint publication of London Financial Times and Moscow-based Izvestia, is available by email. The complete feed includes the full text of all articles published in the Russian language newspaper, and financial and statistical tables on the commodities and financial markets. Write Legpromsyrie at root@sollo.soleg.msk.su for information.
Brainwave for NewsNet has the following newsletters:
Baltic Business Report Czech Republic Business & Investment News East Europe Intelligence Report East Europe & Former Soviet Telecom Report East European Business Law East European Energy Report East European Insurance East European Markets Eastern European Energy Report Eastern Europe Finance Federal News Service Kremlin Transcripts Finance East Europe Poland Business Report PRS Forecasts: Eastern Europe Russia Express Executive Briefing Russia Express Contracts Russia/CIS Intelligence Report
ZiffNet's Business Database Plus has Soviet Aerospace & Technology. Data-Star has the Baltic News Service.
CompuServe's International Trade Forum has a NonEEC Europe & CIS message section.
Sales managers need to know what competitors are doing. Lacking this knowledge, it is risky to maneuver in the market.
Start by making a strategy for online market intelligence. Here are some practical hints:
Can you get everything through the online media? Of course not!
Do not expect to find production data, production formulas, detailed outlines of a company's pension plan, or the number of personal computers in a company. Such information rarely finds its way to public databases.
Financial Times' Profile has Fax Alert. Predefine your interests using search words. Stories will be cut and sent to your personal fax number whenever they appear. Price depends on the number of characters sent.
Other online services offer similar services.
Many companies - large and small - use the networks as a marketing instrument.
Some set up inexpensive bulletin board systems to provide technical support to customers. McAfee Associates, Inc. in California is one example. They offer technical information, help, upgrade software, list of agents, technical bulletins with lists of products, and new products through agents' support BBSes all over the world.
To keep in touch with customers all over the world, Microsoft, Toshiba, Quarterdeck, Digital Research, Tandy, Novell and hundreds of others have a presence on the Internet.
The Internet provides an unparalleled way to present the image it wishes to project, and to communicate all its messages to a diversity of self- selecting, interested audiences. Businesses can also use their Internet presence as an intelligence-gathering device, a valuable feedback loop, and an early warning system for itself - at an amazingly low cost.
Microsoft's Knowledge base is one example. Their database collection of case-study examples, tips, updates and related articles about Microsoft products is available on the Web as http://www.microsoft.com/.
Here are some other interesting examples to check out:
http://www.jango.com
http://www.pizzahut.com/
http://sunsolve1.sun.com
http://www.mastercard.com
http://www.americanexpress.com
http://home.eunet.no/~presno
Mind you, having a Web page has no value if nobody visits it. Make sure you send information about your site to the net's announcement services!
First, study the FAQ-document "How To Announce Your New Web Site" (at http://ep.com/faq/webannounce.html), WebCom's "Publicizing Your Web Site" (http://www.webcom.com/html/publicize.shtml) - which also includes "Registration to Spanish Indexes" - and the Internet Advertising Resource Guide (http://www.admedia.org).
For discussions about Internet Advertising/Marketing techniques, join the I-Advertising mailing list (http://www.internetadvertising.org).
Other interesting places include the Online Advertising Discussion lists (at http://www.tenagra.com and http://www.o-a.com/), and The Internet-Sales Moderated Discussion List (at http://www.mmgco.com). For a long list of Marketing-related Discussion and Announcement Groups on the net, visit http://www.wolfbayne.com/lists/.
Then, find a service that can help you submit your Web address widely to the net's search engines and directories. Here are some ideas:
comp.infosystems.www.announce
http://www.openmarket.com
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://galaxy.einet.net/
doylej@liberty.uc.wlu.edu - Net-link
Finally, browse "The Executive Guide to Marketing on the New Internet" at http://www.industry.net/guide.html, and study ActivMedia's focus look at online marketing trends (http://www.activmedia.com).
The Americans have a gift for this. You meet them in online forums all over the world, in person or through agents, and especially in computer oriented conferences and clubs.
Their main strategy is reference selling. Make key customers happy, and make sure they tell others.
In Chapter 5, I told you what happened when a member wrote about his upgrade to a 425 megabytes hard disk in CompuServe's Toshiba forum. It made me place my order with his preferred seller.
One common sales strategy is to be constantly present in relevant conferences, and spend a generous amount of time helping others. This takes time. By proving competence and willingness to help, you build a positive personal profile. This profile is the key to business, information about competitors and other benefits.
To drop quickly into a conference to post an "advertisement," is a waste of time. The message may be read by some, but chances are that you will be criticized (in public) for having "polluted their environment" with a commercial message. On the Internet, it is considered inappropriate to send out unsolicited information.
A North American business person tried this approach. He posted a long sales letter to all conferences and newsgroups that he could find. The text started like this:
Subject: Court Ordered Liquidation - Computer Memory
- CPU's & DSK Drives
Choice Trading Company, Court Appointed Liquidators, have been
assigned to liquidate the following Multi-Million Dollar inventory
of computer Memory Chips, CPU's and Hard Disk Drives. All items are
new and come with applicable manufactures warranty. Prices quoted
include all state and local taxes plus shipping and handling.
Order Cost
Number Mfg. Description (EACH)
Memory
1524 Toshiba 30 Pin Simms 1x3 70ns 1 meg $ 25.00
1525 Toshiba 30 Pin Simms 1x9 70ns 1 meg 25.00
etc.
Three days later, his mailbox was closed. Furious users had bombarded it with everything from hate mail to megabytes of rubbish. His access provider had to close down the account to avoid serious operational problems.
Another reason for not using the "advertisement" strategy is that the volume of information in the best conferences for your marketing effort probably is too high to make traditional advertisements worthwhile.
When you distribute commercial information, preface it with a concise summary that can be followed-up with more detail if requested. Also, make sure that the information provided is of significant value to readers.
If you're an entrepreneur running a home business, visit the Usenet group at misc.entrepreneurs.
The International Trade Network is on the IntlTrade mailing list. It is for advertisements of exports, imports, services, and direct investments. Trade advertisements may be posted gratis by anyone, and are relayed worldwide by email to subscribers in a daily digest. For information, send email to majordomo@world.std.com with the following in the body of the text (leave the subject blank): INFO INTLTRADE , or check out the mailing lists' Web site at http://www.intltradezone.com/.
You'll find a glossary of terms used in the business of trading at http://centrex.com/terms.html.
Check out the International Trade Forum on CompuServe. Message areas and libraries are divided into geographical parts of the world, as well as topic of general interest. Separate message sections are set up for traders to network and make contacts that may lead to deals.
Here is a list of other useful applications of electronic mail: