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Tales from the Terminal RoomJanuary 2001, Issue No. 17 |
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Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X January 2001, Issue No. 17 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. In this issue:
ReviewSkyminder: information on companies world-widehttp://www.skyminder.com/ Experienced business information searchers know the best sources for accurate, up-to-date information on companies world-wide. They also know how far they can get with free Internet resources and that for some types of information, paying for quality is a fact of life. Two of the problem areas are company financials, the free availability of which varies from one country to another, and market share/product information which can be very expensive. The question for many of us is how much time should we spend (waste?) on tracking down the information, and is it really necessary to tie up substantial amounts of your budget in hefty, up-front annual subscriptions? At Online 2000, the UK Online User Group awarded Skyminder the Best Stand Award. The award is judged on stand attractiveness, innovative design and best use of space, also on how welcoming it is to the visitor and the presence of knowledgeable, helpful stand personnel. As a visitor to Online, I was particularly interested in Skyminder's product: a "one-stop shopping tool for dossier formatted, proprietary and third party global business information of over 31 million public and private companies worldwide." Their promotional material goes on to say:
This sounded extremely promising, especially as there is a pay-as- you-go option, so I registered for my free trial. The sourcesSkyminder will be adding more content providers in the coming months but at the time of my free trial the providers listed on their Web site included:
Although some of the financial sources are of interest to me, it was the RDS sources that particularly attracted me to this service. I am a great fan of Table Base and I have been trying to find a way, other than Dialog's Open Access service, of accessing this service on a pay-as-you-go basis. Accessing the serviceThe service is straightforward to access - no unnecessary animations, flash or Java. I did discover early on, though, that despite what Skyminder says in its Help file you must use Internet Explorer. The pages do not display correctly in Netscape. Also, as the Help file states, your browser must be set up to accept cookies and JavaScript must be enabled. Searching for companiesAfter you have logged on, the default screen is the "Company" search. The other options are Credit Information, News & Tables, Industry, Company List, Executive List and "My Queries". The Company option finds Company Profiles/Overviews and these can include: Name, address, telephone & fax numbers, web address, Ticker Symbol, company status, overview, history, SIC or NACE codes, list of officers, annual sales, number of employees, net income, main competitors, outlook of company industry. It will also find any financials, news and tables that are available for a company. You can search by company name or by ticker symbol. You have to select a country and, if it is a US company, you can also select a state. If you have chosen to search by company name, Skyminder displays a list of possible matches from which you select the one you are looking for. If you are unfamiliar with company structures, you could have problems at this stage although Skyminder does mark those company records that are "Headquarters". Once you have chosen the company, you are presented with an "Ultimate Report" which gives you the company name, country, state (if applicable), city, and SIC description. This is followed by a list of reports that you can select for purchase. The amount and type of information does, of course, vary according to the type of company and the country in which it is registered, but it is also dependent on the coverage of the databases in Skyminder. A search for Nestle in Switzerland came up with a company profile from Dun & Bradstreet, several news articles and tables. For Cadbury Schweppes (UK) I was offered a company overview, highlights, performance, comparison and "detailed financials" from Market Guide; a company profile from Hoovers; and several news items and tables. However, for Thorntons the UK chocolate manufacturer, and a listed company, I was only offered a brief company profile from Dun & Bradstreet and one news item. A search on the Danish company Novo-Nordisk resulted in an abundance of information from Market Guide, Hoovers, Dun & Bradstreet and news and tables. For Kikkoman, a Singapore based, limited company I was offered a Dun & Bradstreet profile. Companies not listed on a stock exchange are covered so you may be able to find information on the larger limited companies. If you are researching smaller organisations, you will probably be out of luck and have to go elsewhere for the data. All of the individual reports in your results list are automatically selected and the total price is shown at the bottom of the page. I found it extremely irritating that there are no prices next to each report. In fact there is no price list at all on the Skyminder Web site. You have to deselect all of the reports in your results and then re-select them individually in order to see what each one is going to cost. When you have selected the reports you want, you click on the Buy button, are asked to confirm your purchase and away you go. Credit InformationIf you require detailed financial information you need to use the Credit Information option. You are required to enter a Company name, a country and a city. Users of Dun & Bradstreet will recognise the procedure and know that the city/town field is mandatory. If you leave the city box blank, there is no prompt or message reminding you to fill all the details - the system just returns a zero result. News & TablesThis is the one area that I am certain I will use on a regular basis, especially as it includes the RDS Table Base information. This is an excellent source of statistics and market information. It is a very quick and effective way of locating this type of information and is preferable to wasting hours on searching the free Internet. News & Tables are included in the Company search option but you can search them separately. The default simple search allows you to search using keywords that can be combined with Boolean AND, OR, NOT if you wish. The default time period is the last 3 months but you can change this to a period going back any number of days, weeks or months. The advanced search has the same keyword search option but you can look for your terms in full text or title, and specify all keywords, any keywords, exact phrase, or "intelligent match". The time period section allows you to specify a date range. In addition you can perform an author search, search on all publications or choose publications from a list. The only serious problem I had with the News & Table search was that I could not refine my search results. When I tried to go back a step to change my search criteria I was automatically returned to the simple search screen and my original search criteria were deleted. Other Search OptionsThe Company List allows you to choose a country and compile a list of companies selected by industry description, activity code, sales range and number of employees. The results (company name, address) can be imported into an Excel spreadsheet. The Industry search provides you with am industry profile, trends, features, key ratios & statistics, comparative company analysis, revenues, net income, cash flow analysis, ratios, equity ratios and per share data. I did not get very far with the Executive List search during my trial - there seemed to be some sort of glitch with the displaying of results - so I cannot report on this feature. Promised as "Coming Soon" is market research but there are no hints as to which providers will be involved. PricesIt is impossible to say in advance what a search on Skyminder is going to cost. There is no price list and sometimes the only way of working out what each chunk of data costs is to select and deselect them from your results list. The sources used for the "Company" option are what I would expect - respected, quality publishers - but I was surprised to see charges for information that is sometimes free if you go direct to the publisher's Web site. Market Guide is the most obvious example: Skyminder charges 3, 4 and 8 USD dollars for separate sections of these reports, but if you go direct to http://www.marketguide.com/ the identical information can be obtained completely free of charge. The free availability of the Dun & Bradstreet "profile" varies from country to country so I find the USD 5 for that acceptable. The Hoovers information includes data from the "subscribers" section of their Web site (http://www.hoovers.com/) so, again, no complaint about the USD 9 charge per record. The argument for using Skyminder, even if the information is free elsewhere, is that you do not have the hassle of accessing each of the sources separately and you have a one-stop shop. Another advantage in using Skyminder is that you can download all of your selected reports as a single Word or PDF file. Nevertheless, experienced Internet users will not be impressed at being asked to pay for what they know is available free of charge on other sites. As far as I can work out the Table Base records cost USD 7.5 each, which is cheaper than Dialog's Open access charge of USD 10.95. News records vary in price but are in single figures. Methods of paymentThere are two methods of payment: setting up a deposit account, from which the cost of your purchases are debited, and a credit card payment option. I suspect that for many people, the pay-as-you-go credit card scheme would be the most attractive BUT if you opt for this you only have access to the Company search and News and Tables. The remaining search options are restricted to Deposit account holders. At the time of writing, I had not received an answer as to why there is this differentiation and no reply to my enquiry regarding the minimum amount that one is required to put into a deposit account. Another important point is that Skyminder does not issue invoices or receipts for either the deposit or the credit card accounts. If you need receipts for your transactions, Skyminder advises you to print out your "Rolling Balance". (I don't think my accountant is going to be too happy with that!) The bottom lineWill I use the service after my free trial has finished? Well, as I have signed up for the pay-as-you go service and have my credit card ready, the answer is obviously yes. But I don't expect I'll use it for company profiles or financials on a regular basis. As a long- serving member of the mean, tight-fisted brigade I know where and how I can access much of that information for free. Skyminder will be a last resort. When it comes to Table Base, though, this is the cheapest pay-as-you-go option that I have come across on the Internet. Skyminder contact details Skyminder/CRIBIS Information ResourcesTop 10 Business Sites http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/ The delegates on our latest Business Information on the Internet course voted the following as the "Top 10" business sites (it is 11 this time as we had a tie for tenth place):
Search Strategies for the Internet http://www.rba.co.uk/search/ The third edition of our publication is rolling off the presses. As with previous editions, the full publication and updates will be available on the RBA Web site. The Summary Sheets and Comparison Table will be made generally available but access to the detailed descriptions and strategies will be restricted to purchasers of the hard copy. Purchasers of the 1st or 2nd editions will be able to download the new edition free of charge from the Web site, or to purchase the hardcopy at a discounted rate Support for SMEs http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/sme.htm Clearlybusiness http://www.clearlybusiness.com/ The information I have seen is of high quality and goes into practical details, which makes a refreshing change from the general waffle one normally sees on sites of this type. For example, under Sales and Marketing there is an article from the magazine Better Business: "Never buy a full price ad again! Don't be fooled into paying the full rate for advertising space. Ad sales people are there to be negotiated with." The article then goes on to explain exactly how to do it. I have now printed it out and pinned it on the wall near my telephone. I eagerly await the next advertising sales call! These things are sent to try us!If IE5 ain't broke, don't fix itI have lost count of the number of times I have warned people NOT to upgrade software just because the upgrade is there, and NOT to fiddle with software settings if everything is working, and NOT to install patches unless there is a very good reason for doing so. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has always been my motto. So what do I go and do? I try and fix something that isn't broken and it ends up totally unusable! I don't know what possessed me to do such an idiotic thing; my only possible excuse was that I was suffering from a New Year's celebration hangover. The perfectly functional thing that I tried to repair was Internet Explorer 5.5. I happened to be browsing a support conference on CIX (my Internet Service Provider) and saw a posting advising a user to install Service Pack 1 (SP1) for IE 5.5. The user in question was experiencing problems accessing specific sites and the technical bods reckoned that SP1 was the solution. For some inexplicable reason, I decided to go off and install SP1 as well, despite the fact that IE is my secondary browser (I still prefer to use Netscape wherever possible) and I have had no problems with IE5.5. The installation procedure was painless, but the next day the trouble began: applets failed to run, printing out Web pages was impossible, and IE would completely seize up after about 10 minutes of surfing. This went on for a couple of days and many of the sites that I can normally view in IE without any difficulty were now unreadable. The only thing that had changed was that I had installed SP1. Off I went to Deja to search Usenet to see if there had been any reports on this. There certainly had! But they fell into two camps. In the first camp were the users who had a broken IE5 and had successfully remedied it by installing SP1: in the second were sufferers like myself. The solution? Well you can't just uninstall SP1, but I did think that the advice given in one group to reformat the hard disk was going a bit too far. In the end I had to remove every vestige of IE and associated Internet programs from my PC and then reinstall them - this time without SP1. It took me the best part of an afternoon as I had lost all my preferences and IE personalisation files and had to customise IE all over agaain. I wasn't too bothered about the Favorites as I save everything in a Netscape bookmark, and I have backups of my email address book. But it could have been very nasty indeed. Never again - until the next time of course! Gizmo of the MonthGoogle's Cache of Web PagesOne of the five most irritating aspects of searching the Web* is finding that the most promising looking page in your results list is inaccessible (you get an error 404 "file not found" or 401/403 "Access forbidden" message). A second is having to work why a search engine has included a page in the results list when you cannot see any of your search terms in the page. Both of these irritations disappear if you use Google (http://www.google.com/) as your search engine. Next to each entry in your Google results lists is the word "cache". Click on this and Google will not only display its own cached copy of the Web page but also highlight your search terms wherever they appear in the page. Do bear in mind, though, that Google's copy of the page may not be the most up to date, and if the page has been withdrawn from the original Web site you need to ask yourself "Why?". * Our nominations for the remaining most irritating aspects of Web searching are:
Meetings and WorkshopsFebruary 13th March 2nd, Business Information on the Internet TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
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| This page was last updated on 20th January 2001 | 2001 |
