Compete.com – Lets you see traffic trends of competing websites, demographic information as well as other important predictors.
quantcast.com – I verified on three sites the monthly uniques are pretty close, good tool for competitive intelligence.
Xinu.com- This one is my new favorite – This tool will be very important as the new Google Universal search is being slowly integrated over the next 6 months. Check it out.
Whether you are focused on market, sales or competitive intelligence, analytics are becoming more important, and useful, every day. Of course, the analytics tool you use has to be focused on your specific need. I see tools come and go that try to be everything to everyone, which ends up working for nobody.
Ericsson, the Swedish multi- national telecom vendor, has signed a global license contract with IntelliSearch. The agreement lets Ericsson use IntelliSearch Enterprise as their central information access tool to their global document management solution based on EMC Documentum. Ericsson’s document management solution has 40,000 users worldwide.
ROCKETinfo, the leader in Enterprise Web 2.0 information search and delivery solutions, announces the launch of a new Channel Marketing Program designed for SEO companies, PR agencies, web marketing & design companies, advertising agencies, SEM firms, web hosting & Internet service providers, and online publishers/web portal managers. ROCKETinfo’s Channel Partner Program is already attracting leaders in online subscription services and interactive marketing.
Mike Lyden and Dan Bukowski, recent graduates from the Mercyhurst Institute for Intelligence Studies share their experiences and lessones learned from the Wiki on Global Diseases project conducted in conjuntion with the National Intelligence Council. Mike Lyden is currently an analyst with McManis & Monsalve Associates (http://www.mcmanis-monsalve.com/). Dan Bukowski works for Booz Allen Hamilton (http://www.bah.com). More information about the Mercyhurst Institute for Intelligence Studies can be found at http://www.mciis.org. The Wiki on Global Diseases project can be viewed at http://nie.wikispaces.com.
Wink searches the major social networks and the Web to find people. The site also provides search filters such as location, age, and interests to help narrow down your search for common names. This search engine allows you to enter a location and other keywords to help narrow the search.
PowerSearch 2007 is a business information search engine that crawls and organizes the “Business Web” and then automatically compiles easy-to-digest profiles about individuals, companies and industries. PowerSearch significantly impoves the depth, freshness and accurancy of search results, and can be easily personalized depending on search styles and needs (sales, marketing, competitive intelligence, recruiting, etc.). It also incorporates contextual search capabilities and provides dynamic competitor lists to help users quickly define and understand markets as they change.
When I read this paragraph I imagine just one CI technology advanced-software - Traction - for a company in 21st Century:
“The information overload that results from the acceleration of — and addiction to — new input has individual and organizational consequences. Not only are we bombarded with too much irrelevant information, we also suffer from information “underload”: not enough relevant information. To understand decision-making, neither overload nor underload is the problem. Good decisions are not always rational or deliberate, and as we will see, expert individuals or teams operate at a much higher bandwidth — in terms of both the volume and speed of input received and considered — than our information systems can support.“
But the most interesting ‘factor’ appears to be the next paragraph where the executive level is the main cause for these factors:
“Most of the time, these reasons apply mostly to the executive level of your company. If the change agents in your company are not committed to using intelligence as a road map or do not find your intelligence relevant, they will continue to make decisions based on intuition and whatever information they find helpful.”
