Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

CI for the Small Fry

Confidential Resource points to an article in the Globe and Mail that does a good job of explaining that CI isn't just for the big boys. My favorite part of the article is something I'm thinking about having inscribed on my door just to remind me on a daily basis (emphasis is mine):

Many answers can be found online or in other public sources; the trick lies in locating and interpreting them. Permit or zoning applications may have been filed with city hall, hints dropped on discussion boards.
But it is primary research that is most powerful: asking questions of suppliers and clients or becoming a "mystery shopper" to see what it's like to be your rival's customer. And experts agree that the most valuable CI resource are your own employees. "Eighty per cent of what you need to know about the competition already resides within the four walls of your organization," Mr. Gibson says.

All About XBRL

AlacraBlog has a post about XBRL or eXtensible Business Reporting Language that links to interesting thoughts about XBRL, including some of Mark Cuban's thoughts on using XBRL to track the bailout.  In a way the most surprising thing about reading the post is realizing that there's still a need to develop standards in various and sundry sectors of our information society.  Imagine when they start trying to do the same in health care!  The last paragraph of the Alacra post is telling:

And perhaps most importantly, the SEC voted 4-1 today to require 500 of the largest public companies to begin filing financial reports using the technology known as XBRL, or extensible business reporting language, by mid-2009. The rest of the companies will be phased in over a two-year period, the SEC said.  We expect that supply (Edgar-Online products, as one example) has been ahead of demand for XBRL products up until now, but we believe that will change rapidly in the next few months.  The XBRL future is here.

How to Automatically Translate Foreign Language Blogs and Websites

Sources and Methods has an excellent how-to post about using RSS feeds, a service called Mloovi and Google Reader to get foreign language feeds translated to English and automatically sent to you. From the post:

Mloovi is a new service that automatically translates feeds from 35 different foreign languages (including Russian, Chinese and Arabic but not, unfortunately, Farsi) into English. Mloovi is powered by Google Translate so it is not going to be any better than Google's service but it does offer some conveniences that Google currently does not provide. The step-by-step to get Mloovi to do its thing follows:

Related, check out their post on how to set up Google Reader with RSS feeds.

EDGAR Going the Way of All Flesh

The SEC's EDGAR database is due to be replaced by IDEA.  Here's the SEC's announcement.  Apparently IDEA will be online by the end of the year.  From the release:

The new system is called IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications. Based on a completely new architecture being built from the ground up, it will at first supplement and then eventually replace the EDGAR system. The decision to replace EDGAR marks the SEC’s transition from collecting forms and documents to making the information itself freely available to investors to give them better and more up-to-date financial disclosure in a form they can readily use.

MarketResearch.com and Spectra Intelligence Announce Deal

From the press release:

As the leading distributor of market intelligence, MarketResearch.com is pleased to announce a business partnership with Spectra Intelligence which allows for the marketing and distribution of Spectra's proprietary market analyses through the MarketResearch.com website.

The new relationship offers business professionals throughout the world easy access to complete product descriptions and tables of contents from research publications authored by market experts at Spectra Intelligence. At the same time, visitors to the MarketResearch.com website have the ability to purchase the material directly through MarketResearch.com's secure server...

Spectra Intelligence provides consistent high-quality market and management reports for the global industry and receives commissions from leading multinational pharma giants to provide competitive intelligence across product and therapy areas. Recent publications include The World Market for Gynaecology, 2007-2017, which provides unrivalled analyses of markets, products, challenges, and opportunities.

For further information about Spectra Intelligence reports, visit http://www.marketresearch.com/redirect.asp?progid=8418&vendorid=3417.

BI as CI?

In an article entitled "Intelligence Quotient" Mike Davis writes the following:

Last week I was asked: ‘What is the definition of business intelligence (BI)? Is it about a company’s own operations, that is, information about itself, or an understanding of what are your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses and market positioning?’

The second alternative is probably the most appropriate definition. But the first is how the term is regarded by most organisations, and until recently much of the vendor community.

Collectively we have bounded our understanding and expectations of BI, and if we wish our businesses to become more productive and competitive, with BI technologies as supporting tools, that has to change.

Does this mean that BI proponents are starting to see the future of "BI" as a kind of CI-light?

Directory of Analyst Firms

Tekrati also has a directory of analyst firms.  You can get to it here, but you need a subscription to get to the detailed data on each firm.

List of Analyst Blogs

There's a site called Tekrati that has a list of analysts' blogs, about 115 of them.  You can find it here.

Blogs, Wikis, RSS and Competitive Intelligence

Arik Johnson, founder of AuroraWDC (SCIP Premier Partner), has a very good article that explains what blogs, wikis and RSS mean for competitive intelligence practioners. 

The article is appearing in Competitive Intelligence Magazine.

Business Intelligence Resources

This site, www.biresources.info, is a weblog with links to literally dozens of business intelligence resources.  The blog is run by Marcus Zillman.