MarketVisual: putting relationships on the map
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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The March edition of VIP Magazine (VIP Magazine Number 89) includes a product review of business relationship mapping service MarketVisual, produced by Seattle-based IntellectSpace. The service provides tailored knowledge maps, visualising business relationships between companies and individuals, based on three degrees of separation. Since MarketVisual produces reports with the underlying data behind each map, it can also be used as a research tool to establish individuals’ connections, corporate affiliations and shareholdings.

The database holds information on around 25 million professionals worldwide whose business, educational and other affiliation details are extracted by web crawlers from publicly available sources on the internet.

The mapping tool creates commonalities between entities and is particularly useful to customers in sales and business development roles wishing to identify new targets via existing contacts. MarketVisual is also marketed to end users involved in investment, compliance and litigation research, as well as to those engaged in competitive and market intelligence.

MarketVisual is very user-friendly and produces sophisticated knowledge maps which would enhance any presentation. Relationships in the knowledge maps are colour-coded, which reminded me of the coloured nodes used by the Leadership Directories mapping device. Along with BoardEx and Directors Database, Leadership Directories was the subject of a VIP comparative review published in January 2010.

Information professionals may have some issues with using MarketVisual, since I found there to be an over-reliance on a narrow set of sources. Also, the use of web crawlers inevitably leads to some inaccuracies. However, given those provisos, researchers will still find useful data here, which would otherwise be time-consuming to compile.

VIP subscribers can read the review by logging into their FreePint account.

Purchase your copy of VIP Report: Product Review of MarketVisual from the FreePint Shop. Or save money by purchasing VIP No. 88, which also includes the VIP Report: Product Review of Morningstar Direct, v 3.18.

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