Automotive World, started by the Financial Times in 1990, has re-launched its web site and now incorporates ‘AWKnowledge’ and ‘AWResearcher’. Automotive World’s subscriptions include daily updates on 12 key automotive sectors and 37 OEMs globally. Printed research publications include The Automotive Quarterly Review, and the World Car and World Truck reports. Forthcoming research titles will cover detailed OEM forward model insight and merger and acquisition strategies of the supply base. The full text of the articles and reports are available to subscribers only but you can view the headlines freeof charge. There is a free RSS feed of industry headlines, but again, the full text of the stories are available to subscribers only. Free trials are available.

‘Russia: All Regions Trade & Investment Guide’, which was mentioned in an earlier blog posting, now has its own web site at http://www.russiasregions.com/
with a free sample region (Moscow). If you only want data on one or two regions, there are now options on the Order page for purchasing them as individual PDF files (£20 each).

Reed Business and search company FAST Search & Transfer have launched a business-to business (B2B) search tool called Zibb. Zibb.com, currently in beta, unifies over 900 of Reed Business titles into a single vertical portal. It will also crawl the indexes of other publisher’s content. There are tabs for searching by News, Products, Suppliers, Webs and Blogs, and All (the default).

Why use this rather than Google? If you are looking for companies and products, and especially smaller companies, you often end up with a large amount of dross even with Google. Try searching for companies such as Next or Smarty in a standard search engine! Zibb narrows down the field considerably. Once you have found the company you are interested in there is a form that you can fill in to request a quote or send an email.

It is still a beta product and is not perfect, but they welcome feedback and quickly corrected some out of date information that I found. I would not use if I were looking for a comprehensive list of product suppliers or manufacturers. For that I would go straight to a directory such as Kelly’s or Kompass. Definitely worth a try and one to watch.

The 2006 edition of the Russia: All Regions Trade and Investment Guide is now avilable. The guide covers all 89 regions giving data on markets, current economic conditions, sources of supply, infrastructure, trade opportunities, operating conditions, investment projects, and the legal and tax environment. Data is provided directly by the local administrations and governments, and reviewed and verified through government agencies. I have found this guide to be an invaluable starting point in the past when researching the trading environment in the region.

Prices range from £395 to £595 depending on whether you order the book and/or the CD ROM and whether you want them in English or Russian, or both. There is a 25% discount if you order before Friday 7th July.

Further information and order forms can be found at http://www.dataresources.co.uk/russ89.htm

Exportis have announced the publication of their 2006 directories.

The International Directory of Importers lists major importers and distributors in 160 countries and contains over 150,000 entries for importing firms in Europe, Asia/Pacific, North America, South/Central America, Middle East and Africa. Detailed company information includes telephone and fax numbers, e- mail and web address, contact person, year established and number of employees.

The Importers Directory is in nine volumes and each of the six geographical areas can be purchased separately.

The International Directory of Agents, Distributors & Wholesalers is organized by country, company and product. The information includes company name and address; telephone/fax numbers; email and web address; contact person; company type; number of employees; year the business was established; bank reference; list of products handled.

Further details and prices are on the Exportis web site at http://www.exportis.freeuk.com/.

Alacra has upgraded its Alacra Store interface with AJAX. So what is AJAX? The acronym stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML and it is a technique for creating interactive web applications. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX):

“The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.”

For me, the new Alacra interface is faster and slicker, and a significant improvement. Alacra Store has also been adding resources, previously only available via its annual subscription service, and all search results now display the keyword in context (KWIC). The KWIC feature allows users to see the frequency and context in which search terms appear in the relevant documents.

Free information is listed at the top of the results screen, but you may find that some of the links take you to a screen that lists subscription services. Nevertheless, for public companies the free snapshots provide excellent summaries.

For those of you who have not yet tried Alacra Store, this is a pay-as-you-go version of Alacra’s business information subscription service. A list of publishers and information providers is at available on the site at http://tinyurl.com/qt6gl . I initially reviewed Alacra Store in the July/August 2005 Tales from the Terminal Room (http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/2005/jul2005.shtml). I am pleased to see that more resources are continually being added but still feel that the news articles are overpriced (now USD 10 an article). I also see that Bun & Bradstreet reports are now available, but at USD 288 they are grossly overpriced if you are looking at private companies. This is not the fault of Alacra: I have seen the same reports at the same price offered via other services, but in my experience they do not offer any information that is not available from other providers at a lower and more reasonable price.

If you are exploring industry sectors, try out out the links at the bottom of the web pages to the public and private company indexes. These are sorted by industry sector and are a quick and easy way of identifying the major companies that are active in a particular sector. There is, though, a problem with the way that they are indexed. I was initially surprised that I could not find the Russian company Gazprom, especially as a keyword search found numerous documents. I then realised that the full name of the company is OAO Gazprom and that it is listed under O and not G. A little more work on the company index is needed, I think, to take into account that many end users will not always know the full legal name of a company.

Overall, highly recommended for anyone requiring pay as you go access to business information.

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).

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.