Monthly Archives: February 2006

Business Information

Russia: All Regions, Trade & Investment Guide

Available from Effective Technology Marketing, Russia: All Regions, Trade and Investment Guide is a comprehensive compilation of data for all regions of Russia. The Guide provides accurate, up-to-date information on markets, current economic conditions, sources of supply, infrastructure, trade opportunities, operating conditions, investment projects, legal and tax environment. Data is gathered directly from local administrations and governments, and reviewed and verified through government agencies.

The Guide has been completely revised for 2006 and is available separately in English and Russian with full colour charts, graphs and maps, and a fully searchable CD-ROM. There is a prepublication discount of 25% and discounted prices range from Eur 449 to Eur 679 depending on whether you opt for the book and/or CD-ROM and the language of publication (English or Russian, or both).

Business Information

BvDEP launches Russian company database

Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing (BvDEP) is launching RUSLANA, a source of information on companies in Russia and the Ukraine. RUSLANA will contain both standardised and “as reported” financial information for nearly a million companies. It will be available from February 16th 2006 via bvdep.com.

RUSLANA will include profit and loss and balance sheet data in various accounting formats for approximately 600,000 Russian, and over 260,000 Ukrainian, companies, with summaries for a further 100,000 Ukrainian companies. The data is supplied by Creditreform, providers of business reports on companies in both region. Supplementary data includes: BvDEP detailed ownership information, news including M&A activity from ZEPHYR, activities, management, import/export details and stock price data.

To support and promote the new product, BvDEP has established a new office in Moscow which is overseen by Mark Schwerzel, BvDEP’s director for Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. RUSLANA will be provided via the internet, initially in English, with plans to launch a Cyrillic version in the near future. It will be aimed at financial services/banks, corporates, consultancies and accountants, as well as the public sector, and will be typically used for financial research, credit analysis and business to business marketing.

More information about RUSLANA is available from BvDEP on info@bvdep.com and bvdep.com where you can request a free trial.

Exalead

Exalead reaches 4 billion pages

Exalead is now searching over four billion Web pages and aims to reach eight billion by July. As many information professionals say, the size of the web database is irrelevant if it generates rubbish results but a critical mass is essential to encourage users to use a search engine, and Exalead has certainly done that now.

I am a great fan of Exalead: it has several unique features and has resurrected a couple that were discarded by the other main stream engines long ago. You can use wildcards (*) at the end of a word and the NEAR command looks for your terms within 16 words of each other. Unique features include phonetic and approximate spelling search options, and the pattern matching option enables you to cheat – ahem, I mean – can help you find that final, elusive solution for your crossword puzzle.

And if you want to run your search in other search tools after running it through Exalead, you can set up short cuts to them from Exalead’s home page. (For further details see Tales From the Terminal Room October 2005: Exalead revamps web search.

Inforum

Inforum – Final Call for Papers

The organisers of the 12 Inforum Conference on Professional Information Resources, to be held on May 23 – 25, 2006 in Prague have issued a final call for papers.

If you are interested in presenting a paper, the topics are:

  • The Future of Scientific and Technical Information Searching
  • Trends & News in the Field of Electronic Information Resources
  • Current Trends and Technologies of Digital Libraries
  • Web Search News, Wikis, Blogs and RSS
  • Open Access – a New Way for the Distribution of Scientific Information?
  • Management of Information and Knowledge in the Business Environment
  • E-learning and the New Information Technologies in Medical Libraries

Participation of both, researchers and practitioners is strongly encouraged. The first author of the accepted paper will be entitled to free registration.

Submissions in the form of abstracts should meet the following requirements and include:

1. Major theme of the paper should be in line with the conference topics and the content should be strictly non-commercial
2. Paper title
3. Abstract of 200 words, in English.
4. Author(s) and/or co-author(s) with names, addresses, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses.

Abstracts should be submitted using via the form on the conference web site http://www.inforum.cz/inforum2006/english/papers3.php

Deadlines

February 13th, 2006: Submission of abstracts
March 8th, 2006: Acceptance notifications will be sent out
April 24th, 2006: Submission of full text’s electronic versions

Accepted papers will be published by means of electronic proceedings on the Inforum website.