My Favourite Tipples from a Marketing Intelligence Specialist
Jinfo Blog

By Arthur Weiss

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Arthur Weiss. He shares some of his favourite online resources for researching macroeconomic statistics and hard-to-find financial data to the latest thinking on business strategy.

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When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I help clients to find information that they thought couldn't be found. Part of the secret is knowing what can be found and what can't - so that clients aren't promised results that can't be achieved. It also means knowing a wide range of sources (and how to find them in the first place). Some are used regularly, while others are in my briefcase for the more esoteric enquiry. 

• Knoema: Knoema is a relatively new website, having launched in 2012. It describes itself as a knowledge platform but this is an understatement. Holding 500 separate sources and over 6,000 databases, it is a massive repository of all sorts of information ranging from the esoteric (Bangalore traffic statistics) to the mainstream. I discovered it when asked for information on the Malawi tourism industry and the site provides information on this, broken down by country, expenditures, arrivals and more. This is just one of many areas covered - including historical data on GDP levels, commodity pricing, demographics and much more. 

• Index Mundi: This makes finding and analysing import/export statistics easy, showing graphs and tables broken out by country, product chapter and section - allowing  for trends to be analysed and countries compared. Like Knoema, this is a great source for finding macroeconomic statistics and similar in an easily understandable and visually appealing format. 

• Investigative Dashboard: Often I'm expected to find financial information. While most of my work focuses on the UK, every now and then I need to look further afield. The Investigative Dashboard is aimed at helping investigators find financial data from anywhere in the world, and the site includes an index of registries and other databases holding financial data globally. For some offshore databases it is invaluable - for example, holding links to a dataset allowing for searches of the Panama company registry by director name. This is a feature that isn't offered on the Panama registry itself - and is a real help when trying to trace the interests owned by a suspect individual when you don't know what companies he/she actually owns. 

• Harvard Business Review Blog: Keeping up to date on all sorts of business ideas is crucial for me. When leading training workshops I need to know what people are saying, discussing and thinking about with regards to business and marketing strategy. The Harvard Business Review is one source for staying on top and their blogs are informative, interesting, sometimes controversial but always an enjoyable read. 

An article in FreePint which I found particularly interesting:

• The recent article by Chris Porter about forthcoming changes to the pricing of company information at Companies House was particularly interesting to me, as a big user of UK company financials. Over the last couple of years I've used free services such as DueDil, mentioned in the article, and also Company Check. However I've still had to pay for some information that these sites don't offer for free. With data becoming free next year, this will make my life much easier - as I'll be able to go direct to the source for almost all my UK Company financial data. Next step - make reports from the FCA's Mutual Public Register free? Electronic copies are £12 per year!

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