Tag Archive for 'Economic Intelligence'

World Bank Data Available Through Google Search

Published
by
Ian Smith
on November 13, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence and Economic Intelligence
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Google just made life a whole lot easier for individuals searching for  information on the World Bank’s website.

Through Google’s general search interface, users can now access the 17 “World Development Indicators” from the international agency.  By simply entering queries such as “gdp of Australia” or “internet users in south africa”, Google will provide a thumbnail size image of the result at the top of the page.  Figure 1 illustrates the result given for “gdp of Australia” once the thumbnail image is clicked on.

Figure 1: Result For The Query, “gdp of australia” - Line Chart
Please Click On The Image To Enlarge

Once users have accessed a chart as seen above, comparisons can done by ticking off the box associated with the name of other countries. The list of the countries is located on the left-hand side of the page. Figure 2 presents a comparison of GDP for Australia, Canada and Greece for 2008.

Figure 2: Comparison of GDP for Australia, Canada and Greece
Please Click On The Image To Enlarge

Once the end-product of the search and comparisons is completed, users can easily share their findings by clicking on the “Link” button in the top right-hand corner of the page.  Google generates a hyperlink which can be sent in an email, messaging platform (ie, IM, Facebook chat) or posted on a blog.

Customize Google News Sections For Economic Intelligence

Published
by
Ian Smith
on November 9, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Economic Development, Economic Intelligence and Internet tools
. 0 Comments

In September 2009, Intelegia published, “The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence“, a series of posts dealing with how to use the different Google applications to find information for economic development purposes.  One key application, Google News, has been modify to make life easier for the online researcher in economic development agencies.

Users of Google News can now create and customize their sections and share them with others.

Once logged on to Google News with an username and password, users are asked to complete a form with details which Google will use to create the section.   Details such as a name of the section, search terms, type of edition, source location and the permission to publish the section must be filled out.  Figure 1 below illustrates this process for a customize news section for “foreign direct investment”.

Figure 1:Creating Google Customized News Section
Click on image to enlarge

When users click on the “Create” button on the bottom of the page, the section will appear with the default sections that comes along with Google News.  Figure 2 shows the appearance of the “Foreign Direct Investment” section on the left hand side of page highlighted in dark blue.

Figure 2: Listing of “Foreign Direct Investment” Section
Please click on image to enlarge

This new feature is only available for Google News editions for Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Google Customized News Section is available here

Site Selection Intelligence With Bing Maps

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 29, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Economic Intelligence, Internet tools and Investment Attraction
. 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, we introduced Google Street View as a means to collect information for site selectors in terms of location details of possible sites.  To provide a balance view of such mapping tools, here is a look at Bing Maps.

Using Bing Maps is pretty straight forward.  Simply plug in the address that you are interested in and let Bing Maps do the rest.  Bing Maps will first provide you with a general map overview with the specific location identified with arrow as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1:A general map overview for 6100 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec

Bing Map gives you 5 different option in which to view the specific location on the map such as:

  • Road
  • Aerial
  • Bird’s Eye
  • Labels
  • Traffic

Figure 2 illustrates the bird’s eye view for 6100 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec.

Figure 2: Bird’s eye view for 6100 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec.

Similar to Google Street View, Bing Maps offers navigational control toolbox to move around the map.  The toolbox is located  in the top left hand corner of the page.

Tools such as Bing Maps and Google Street View are handy to have especially on a website that is dedicated for investment attraction.  This kind of functionality would allow site selectors to conduct online research regarding available locations to expand in a region with the surrounding infrastructure.

Bing Maps is available at http://www.bing.com/maps

The Importance Of Monitoring Capital Investments in Your Industry? – Case 1

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 16, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence and Economic Intelligence
. Closed

Last week, the notion of tracking capital investments in your industry was introduced.  An abundance of details can be collected about the sector, competitors and various investment projects.  To demonstrate this, consider the following case scenario.

As one of several competitors in the energy sector, you are interested in knowing the level of foreign direct investment flowing into Canada from specific countries in 2008 and 2009.

Using information from E&B DATA’s Information Observatory, the following details are available:

Within the past 22 months, foreign direct investment in the energy sector in Canada originated from the following top five countries.

  • France
  • Germany
  • Spain
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Figure 1 presents that the majority of the investments in the sector came from the United Kingdom with 46%.


Figure 1: Source of FDI in Canada for energy sector in 2008-2009 by percentage

Drilling down further into the data reveals that some of the investments from the United Kingdom were made by TCI Renewables Ltd. and REG Ltd. (Renewable Energy Generation) via their Canadian subsidiaries - Air Energy TCI, Venterre and AIM PowerGen Corporation. Below is a sample of the announcements made by these investors.

These companies were contacted to validate the amount of the investment that was made and the number of jobs that were created.

Next week’s case:  As a major competitor to Xstrata, you would like to investigate the number and the type of investments (ie, new facility, expansion, modernization) that the company has made during the past three years.

Site Selection Intelligence With Google Street View

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 15, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Economic Intelligence and Investment Attraction
. 0 Comments

Here is a practical tip for site selection professionals and key decision makers for finding a location a new facility when it comes to investment attraction.

Google Street View is a neat tool that allows you to see images at specific address and the surrounding area from a street level view.  The images provided by Google are fairly recent.

The application is very easy to use and can be done in 4 steps.

1. Log onto Google Maps
2. Enter the address of the location that is under investigation. (Be sure to add the city along with the address)
3. When Google provides a general map of the area, place your mouse on the orange stick figure located in the top left hand corner and drag the mouse to the point on the map indicated by the red balloon labeled with an “A”.  Figure 1 and Figure 2 illustrates this process for the address 6200 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec.

Figure 1: Stick figure highlighted in yellow to be dragged to Point A on the map, highlighted in green.
Please click on image to enlarge

Figure 2: A street view of 6200 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec
Please click on image to enlarge

4. Once you have accessed the image, you are able to zoom in and out to have 360 degree view the existing infrastructure around the specific location.  This is done by using the navigation tool highlight in blue in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Illustration of the navigation toolbar of Google Street View

The idea of using Google Street View for site selection purposes will no doubt provide professionals with a time saving tool and a key resource to gather location information without stepping outside whether it to go across the street or around the world.

To begin using Google Street View, please click here

Google Advanced Search For Economic Intelligence?

Published
by
Ian Smith
on September 29, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence and Economic Intelligence
. 1 Comment

When was the last time that you used Google Advanced Search for your economic intelligence needs?

The Google Advanced Search feature is an option often ignored by users on a daily basis. Many individuals take the function for granted but it is handy to have.  Competitive intelligence researchers will tell you that using the function will lead to finding information that you would not have expected to be on the web within seconds.

In case you have not dared to use the the advanced feature before, Figure 1 illustrates the search interface of Google Advanced Search.

Figure 1: Google Advanced Search Interface
(Click on the image to enlarge the screen shot)

The main objective of using such an interface is to filter results and hopefully provide relevant information in a specific format for your needs.  Some of the things that you can do with Google Advanced include:

  • Specify the number of results you may see per page
  • View results in different languages
  • Access documents in a variety of formats (ie, MS-Word, MS-Excel, .pdf)
  • Search within a site or domain name (ie, restricting a search to one specific website)

Case Example: Foreign Direct Investment in the United States

You are in a  rush to find a current and detailed report regarding foreign direct investment in the United States and the regular Google search is not doing the trick.  What do you do?

Solution: By turning to the advanced search option, you can submit a query in which Google can attempt to find a document that was publish in the past year.  In addition, you may specify that would like the document to be in .pdf..  (Most reports are stored in .pdf for online readership)

Submitting the query with the two criteria will provide you with the following page of results with the relevant hit highlighted in yellow in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Listing of Results For Query - United-States “Foreign Direct Investment ” filetype :.pdf in the past year
(Click on the image to enlarge the screen shot)

This hit leads to the report in .pdf, “Foreign Direct Investment in The United States” published by the Organization for International Investment in March 2009

For addition details on search operators for Google Advanced Search queries, please click here

The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence: Part 6 - Google Video

Published
by
Ian Smith
on August 18, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence and Economic Intelligence
. 0 Comments

In the sixth and last part of the series, “The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence“, let us take a look at Google Video for relevant information for economic development.

You may wonder what kind of information could be found with Google Video that would benefit individuals such as economic development officers or potential investors?  The answer is pretty simple if you stop and think about it.  With the introduction of video sharing platforms such as YouTube, individuals and organizations are making interesting content available courtesy of videos.  Finding content dealing with different economic development initiatives from different organizations in video format is amazing.

Google Video is a video sharing and searching platform.  In October 2006, Google bought YouTube to make its content available via Google Video.

Google Video

Please click on the image to enlarge.

Case Study:

As a consultant, you are asked by an economic development officer of a remote region to provide an example of mining services hub or network.

Solution:

Going to Google Video and entering the keywords, “mining services network” will allow you to access the following video clip: regarding the Desert Knowledge Australia Mining Services Network.

Did you miss a post from The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence series?  Please find below the links to the previous five posts:

The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence: Part 5 - Google News

Published
by
Ian Smith
on August 11, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence and Economic Intelligence
. 0 Comments

In this fifth installment of the series of “The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence“,  we will take a look at Google News.  Knowing this application beyond entering a couple of keywords will help you in your next economic intelligence or competitive intelligence research tasks.

Without a doubt, news articles are the best sources for intelligence on various subjects, especially if they are written by industry experts and reputable journalists.

Google News provides you with access to over 4,500 sources in the english language.  In addition, news articles can be supplied in 18 languages (July 2009).  To go beyond the routine Google News search, one has to look to the Google News Advanced Search and the Archive Search for content that is older than 30 days.  Both interfaces are presented below.

Google News Advanced Search

Google News - Advanced Search
Please click on the image to enlarge.

Google News Archive Search

Google News - Archive Search
Please click on the image to enlarge.

Case Study

You are called upon to identify if Walmart has made capital investments in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in the past 30 days and in the year, 2007.

Solution

Using the Google News - Advanced Search option right off the bat, you are called upon to pluggin the keyword(s) - Saskatchewan, capital investment, investment - in the form:”with all of the words” field and enter the country, Canada, in the “Source Location” field.  One result from such a query is: Saskatchewan to be home of two Walmart ’supercentres’ (Source: Leader-Post, July 21st, 2009)

Turning to Google News - Archive Search option and using the same keywords and the year, 2007,  you will discover that Walmart invested in two stores as stated in the article, “Wal-Mart more than a store for Kindersley” (Source: Canada.com, February 17th, 2007)

Please Note:If you select to use the Archive Search option, keep in mind that not all articles are free to access.  You may encounter links that will bring you to a page that will ask you for payment to view the content.

The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence: Part 4 - Google Groups Search

Published
by
Ian Smith
on August 4, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Economic Intelligence and Internet tools
. 0 Comments

In the first couple of posts in the series, The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence, we examined how relevant applications such as Google Alerts, Google Finance and Google Blog Search are to economic intelligence for economic development projects.

This post will elaborate on the benefits of using Google Groups Search for information gathering online.

Google Groups are platforms in which individuals may have discussions on various topics.  As of July 2009,  Google Groups has searchable archives of more than 700 million Usenet postings from a period of more than 20 years.

Intelegia - Tools For Thought - Google Groups

Please click on the image to enlarge.

Case Study:

You are interested in thoughts of individuals and related information regarding the past levels of foreign direct investment in India.

Solution:

By simple inputting the keywords such as “foreign direct investment” and “India”, you can access discussion posts such as past newspaper articles and analysis reports.

The Many Faces Of Google For Economic Intelligence: Part 3 - Google Blog Search

Published
by
Ian Smith
on July 24, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence and Economic Intelligence
. 0 Comments

Last week, Tools For Thought highlighted the use of Google Finance for economic intelligence and its relevancy to preparing to meet a potential investor for foreign direct investment purposes.  This post will take a look at Google Blog Search.

As the name suggest, Google Blog Search exclusively retrieves relevant posts based on keywords.  Although blog posts may appear in the results from the general search application, it is wise to select the blog search option to avoid the irrelevant hits.

You may wonder in what circumstances would you go to the application for economic intelligence purposes?

Blogs are outlets for individuals to publish their insights on various subjects without depending on a webmasters on a timely basis.  Citizens of towns often start their own blog to voice their concerns on an proposed project that will have definite economic spin offs.

Google Blog Search

Please click on the image to enlarge.

Case Example:

You are interested in reading opinions about the different job creation programs available in Ontario, Canada.

Solution:

Using Google Blog Search, you may find several posts by individuals discussing several issues and expressing their views.  This type of information is often forgotten when collecting economic intelligence for economic development intiatives.