Loading The Bases

With the explosion of the database industry, information on practically anything is only a phone call away.

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If using on-line databases always seemed too much trouble for too little payoff, now is a good time to reconsider their merits. Three recent trends -- a dramatic increase in data available, ease of use, and "dedicated" software packages designed for specific databases -- make these compilations of business and financial data more valuable than ever before.

Consider these statistics. Last fall, 1,350 databases were available from 213 on-line services; this fall there are nearly 1,800 offerings from 270 on-line services. And the number is growing by about 35% annually, according to Carlos A. Cuadra, president of Cuadra Associates Inc., publisher of the quarterly Directory of Online Databases (see "How to Find the Database You Need," page 214).

About half of these new databases are related to business and financial topics, with most of the remainder containing specialized technical information that could even the odds for smaller companies vis a vis their larger competitors. "A sizable portion of the English-speaking world's printed information is already indexed or abstracted in databases," says Steven Sieck, director of the Electronic Information Program at Link Resources Corp., a New York City organization that keeps tabs on the industry.

Whether you want to identify new markets, spot important developments in existing ones, analyze the competition, or even compare your operating ratios with those of your competitors, there is, in all likelihood, a database that will help do the job.

Here are some of the more recent and useful entries:

Dun's Market Identifiers, produced by Dun's Marketing Services, a company of The Dun & Bradstreet Corp., contains the names, addresses, and phone numbers of 1.5 million business establishments with $1 million or more in sales. Listings also identify the type of business, the year the company was founded, whether it has single or multiple locations, sales volume and number of employees, and the names of the executive officers and directors. Using this database, a British financial-services company seeking to expand, for instance, was able to count in 20 minutes every New England company from $1 million to $25 million in sales. Directory of Companys will soon be available from Pergamon-InfoLine, and will contain similar information as Dun's Market Identifiers on English companies. Electronic Yellow Pages, which contain the Yellow Pages from nearly every U.S. city's telephone book, can also be useful to companies developing new markets.

Trademarkscan, which contains 600,000 registered and pending trademarks, can help make a quick first cut when considering new names for products or businesses.

Textline abstracts economic and business news from most major European newspapers. It can be particularly valuable for checking out overseas companies, since its summaries of foreign-language news stories are written in English.

Lexpat, from Mead Data Central, gives the full text of U.S. patents issued since 1975. Recently, a manufacturer that was considering developing a motorcycle helmet fitted with a two-way radio searched Lexpat to see if the idea had previously surfaced. He found that three or four people had taken out patents on similar devices. Quick calls to the inventors ascertained that their brainchildren were available for licencing.

NewsNet is a vendor that has put about 200 specialized newsletters on-line. Gaetano J. Tata, owner of a five-person video production company in Davie, Fla., uses the service weekly for keeping up with events in his industry and ferreting out news of grants available to independent TV producers. Since some of the newsletters he is interested in cost as much as $800 a year, he figures that the $50 to $75 he spends a month is a real bargain.

The Computer Database, which debuts this month, will abstract articles from more than 500 computer-related publications and will provide valuable information for companies developing or marketing computer-related products.

In the jargon peculiar to the database world, producers, or "information providers," compile databases; vendors, or "information utilities," sell the finished products to end users -- although sometimes the lines between the two get blurred.

Producers, which can be nonprofit or for-profit, differ in how they serve up their data. PTS Time Series and PTS Forecasts, produced by Predicasts Inc., in Cleveland, for instance, are a combination of bibliographic and factual databases, since they extract annual statistics on industries from thousands of published sources. The Department of Commerce produces a so-called full-text database, Commerce Business Daily, which announces federal procurements and contract awards, and is simply an electronic version of the Department's print ed daily. Then there are factual databases, such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statis tic's Producer Price Index, which gives wholesale price levels for approximately 6,000products.

Finally, there are bibliographic databases, such as Management Contents, which indexes and abstracts articles from more than 700 business publications. You have to order the original from the publisher, a library, or a document delivery firm. (Management Contents, as it happens, also delivers.)

Individual databases may be available through one vendor or several. Management Contents, for instance, is offered by Dialog Information Services Inc. and System Development Corp. (SDC), among others. A note of caution: Some vendors offer only partial databases. The Source, for example, a consumer service that is not particularly useful for serious business research, lists Management Contents in its catalog, but provides an abbreviated version with only 28 magazines. Most of the major vendors, however, deliver a full set of goods (see "Major Business Database Vendors," page 212).

Vendors generally charge on a pay-as-you-go basis: You are assessed only for "connect time," the minutes you are actually on-line. That fee usually ranges from $50 to $100 per hour for business databases, although a few vendors will collect a sign-up fee of about $50. Some, like Dun's Market Identifiers, one of the more expensive at $100 an hour, also charge an additional sum -- Dun's is $1.00 to $1.50 per company name (depending on format) -- for each item that you retrieve. The procedure for signing up with a vendor is simple: After filling out an application, you are assigned a password, and are ready to go.

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