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More Free Competitive Intelligence Tools

Thu, 08/11/2011 - 22:53 by admin   Tags:

Sitetrail.com offers a wide range of competitive intel stats abouts a competitors website in a well presented fashion bit.ly/quWERk. Various intel is offered under the following categories: SEO Analysis, Visitor Analysis, Traffic Analysis, Revenue Analysis, Content Analysis, Link Analysis, Hosting Analysis, Domain Analysis, Server Analysis, Color Analysis (never seen that one before!!!), DNS Record Analysis, and HTTP Header Analysis. As you can see a pretty comprehensive selection. Unfortunately, I could find any ability to compare multiple competitors at once. Nonetheless, a decent effort at a one-stop-shop.

When a competitor site you're tracking changes, did you ever forget what the old version looked like? The Way Back Machine will help you out in many cases bit.ly/mWVpCE. While not all sites are tracked, many are. This tool could also provide you with a better idea of how changes to a competitor's site have trended over time, which might give you a better guess at where they're headed in the future.

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Free Infographic Tool - IBM's Many Eyes

Sun, 06/19/2011 - 14:38 by admin   Tags:

IBM's free 'Many Eyes" tool (bit.ly/lFYDWQ) lets users upload a variety of different datasets (including free text, geographic information and relationship data for network diagraming). While I have only minimally played around with my own data on the site, its seems like a very useful tool that produces great visualizations. The only major downside is that any analyzed data must be uploaded so that anyone in the public domain can see it. 

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Free Web Analytics Tools to Assess Competitor Websites

Fri, 09/10/2010 - 19:25 by admin   Tags:

Google Analytics is a great analytics tool for assessing the performance of your own site. But where do you go when you are interested in understanding how your competitors are performing online?

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Useful Websites of an International Nature

Thu, 05/20/2010 - 03:52 by admin   Tags:

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development www.oecd.org

International Monetary Fund (IMF) - a group that "fosters global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world." www.imf.org/

European Union - Publications section europa.eu/documentation/official-docs/index_en.htm

G8 Information Centre - www.g7.utoronto.ca/

The World Bank - Publications section www.worldbank.org/reference/

World Trade Organisation - Publications section www.wto.org/english/docs_e/docs_e.htm

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Guide to Fee-based Business Databases

Thu, 05/20/2010 - 03:39 by admin   Tags:

For those who have access to subscription databases through work, college or your local library, here are some that I have found useful in the past.

EBSCO - probably your first port of call with slightly better search filters than ABI Inform

ABI Inform - a close tie with EBSCO

Science Direct - Very good source too and contains most of the significant publications not contained in either of the above two databases.

Others worth trying are Emerald Insight, Wiley Interscience and Sage. All of the databases mentioned in this post contain high quality publications.

I think at this point I should also mention that I have rated the above databases from a general business user's perspective.

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High Quality Sites for Irish Business Research

Thu, 05/20/2010 - 02:17 by admin   Tags:

Due to the fragmented nature of the Irish Government, it can sometimes be difficult for a novice to find good business information. Here are some sources that I have found useful in the past:

Forfás - National advisor for Enterprise and Science www.forfas.ie/

Central Statistics Office - Contains a variety of useful statistics across a number of areas www.cso.ie/

OECD - Ireland's Section www.oecd.org/country/0,3377,en_33873108_33873500_1_1_1_1_1,00.html

IntertradeIreland - Promotes cross border trade www.intertradeireland.com/

Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment - Get to the Office of Science Technology and Innovation through the 'Science, Technology and Innovation' link www.entemp.ie/

Industrial Development Agency - Promotes inward investment http://www.idaireland.com/

Enterprise Ireland - Responsible for promoting indigenous business http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/

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Academic Presentations

Thu, 05/20/2010 - 01:57 by admin   Tags:

Here are two sites that contain collections of videos that deal with new exciting ideas, often of an academic nature.

TED - http://www.ted.com/

Academic Earth - a great catch-all www.academicearth.org/

Yovisto - Academic video search site www.yovisto.com/

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Good Business Research Sites

Thu, 05/20/2010 - 01:37 by admin   Tags:

Below are some very good search sites for a variety of business topics.

Google Advanced Search - Lesser used functions within the 'Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more' drop down menu can be very helpful. In particular, filtering by date and region can narrow down your search results.www.google.co.uk/advanced_search

Google Scholar - Always a good start, but doesn't always deliver the best results for academic research. I've worked on a few projects in the past, where I've been familiar with key papers in an area, and Google Scholar has missed seminal studies (or ranks them so far down the search results you'll never get to them) scholar.google.com/

Also remember with Google you can use '~' to search for the synonyms of words and Google Trends is a great way to dissect key word search data www.google.com/trends

Alexa is fantastic for indicating which are the key websites in an area you're not familiar with. Its also got a handy tool for comparing traffic statistics of major websites www.alexa.com/

LinkedIn is good if you're looking to identify, and possibly contact, key people in an area.www.linkedin.com/

Wolfram Alpha is supposed to be useful for more statistical/mathematical/scientific information, although I must admit that I haven't used it that much yet. www.wolframalpha.com/

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