HOT NEWS IN THIS REPORT:

1. Competitive Intelligence
2. Trend: Growth of Java Applications
3. Get Ready for New Top-Level Domains

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COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

In today's dynamic business environment, Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a strategic necessity. The Web's ever expanding content has dramatically simplified the process of gathering Competitive Intelligence. As your competitors do business, they leave behind an information trail. If you know where to look, you can uncover a wealth of information about competitors' business activities, product developments and future plans. The goal of this issue of ETB is to provide you with the best tools, resources and strategies that will help you anticipate change and strengthen your company's competitive position.

The strategic value of CI

Properly organized and conducted, Competitive Intelligence can help your organization to become more successful and profitable by:

- Predicting your competitor's next move, giving your company more time to react - Helping you to turn a weakness into an advantage - Making you aware of change as it happens, before it's too late to act, and - Allowing you to beat a competitor to market with a new product, or minimizing the impact of the competitor's product introduction

News sources

Newspapers are often an excellent source of news about your competitors. They often cover company announcements and news stories in greater detail than the national wire services. Often, the local "spin" on a story can yield important insights that you can't find elsewhere. NewsDirectory is an excellent resource if you're trying to locate a local newspaper on-line; it provides links to over 8,400 websites of daily U.S. newspapers.

Excite's NewsTracker service is a powerful electronic "clipping service" that you can set up to search over 300 news sources based on key words that you specify. As you review the results of your NewsTracker hits, you can indicate which stories most closely matched your needs, and it will "learn" to find more articles like it.

Publicly-held companies

If your competitor is a publicly held company, it must file a mountain of paperwork to comply with Federal shareholder regulations. The EDGAR database is one of the best resources for locating 10K (annual) reports, which sometimes contain information not included in a company's annual report to its shareholders, and 10Q (quarterly) reports, which provide an ongoing snapshot of a company's financial performance.

Dow Jones News Service offers a large library of on-line publications, plus business news, stock quotes and other company and industry financial data.

Brokerage house reports are another valuable source of competitive nuggets. The major brokerage firms usually assign analysts to specific industries, which gives them great focus and deep insights into the strategic directions of the companies they cover. One good source for brokerage house reports is MultexNet.

Several information portals also offer paid searches for other public records of businesses, large or small. For example, CDB InfoTek's search tools enable you to check Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) reports on competitors, check for court filings, liens and judgments, determine actual and projected sales growth for companies and other valuable information for a monthly subscription fee of $25. KnowX is a company that provides similar services, charging between $6.95 and $29.95 per detailed record retrieved with volume discounts.

Public Records

State Universal Commercial Code (UCC) filings tell you when your competitor is borrowing money and what they plan to use it for. One site that does paid searches for UCC filings is 1800WhoWhere.com. UCC filings cost $29.95 for a statewide search and $59.95 for nation-wide. Many state governments also offer free, searchable databases of UCC filings.

New Product development

If you're looking for insights into new products and technologies that your competitors are developing, here are two key places you should look:

First, to determine if your competitors are working on any new technologies, check for recent patent grants and pending applications at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office database.

Technical conference proceedings can also be a treasure trove of competitive information, because that's where engineers reveal to each other the technologies and applications they're working on. The huge DIALOG on-line database contains a searchable index of thousands of conference proceedings. The cost for this service ranges between $1.00 and $94 per database file. There are also discounts if you opt to sign up as a member.

Competitive Intelligence tools

Monitoring dozens of websites to keep up with recent announcements from your competitors can be a time-consuming process, unless you use a tool like NetMind, which may be one of the most powerful Competitive Intelligence tools available today. It's free service, Mind-It, tracks changes to any Web page or site, and alerts you via e-mail when any of the pages that it is monitoring change. Mind-It is easy to use and highly customizable. You can use it to track specific pages within a competitor's website - such as press releases, new products and job openings - or add keyword tracking for a competitor's name to a government agency's calendar page, so you will know about any meetings between that company and regulatory agencies.

COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE TIPS & STRATEGIES

Here are several tips and strategies to keep in mind when developing your Competitive Intelligence strategy:

Don't assume that your knowledge of your competitors is current -- it probably isn't.

In most companies, multiple executives obtain bits and pieces of Competitive Intelligence, but it is never assembled together into a cohesive, real-time picture of competitive activities. The solution is surprisingly simple: Alert key employees who have contact with your customers, dealers and suppliers that you are on the lookout for information on your competitors. When they hear something about one of these companies, ask them to send you an e-mail message with the pertinent information.

To organize this information quickly and easily, create a set of folders in your e-mail program, one for each competitor. Then, as e-mail messages arrive from members of your intelligence network, simply move each one to the pertinent company folder. This is a painless way to build a collection of news and information on each of your target companies. With most mail programs, you can have this sorting done automatically if you set up a rule in advance, and have everyone use common subject headers (such as: CI - XYZ Company)

Your own suppliers are sources of competitive information. They visit your competitors, just as they do your company. Ask open-ended questions, such as "Where could we improve? Any idea where Company B buys their components?"

Use the AltaVista or Google search engines to verify links to the competitor's website by typing in link:www.competitorname.com. This can help you identify partners, suppliers and other relationships you couldn't find any other way.

To get hints on a company's strategic direction, check out its website for any posted job openings, and analyze the types of jobs they're seeking to fill. Also be sure to check out job portal sites like CareerPath, which allows you to search employment ads from leading U.S. newspapers.

Finally, check out Helen P. Burwell's excellent book, "On-line Competitive Intelligence." It contains some very comprehensive lists of CI resources and valuable strategies for employing them.

If your company is serious about Competitive Intelligence, you should consider joining the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals (SCIP), which provides its members with a variety of networking and educational opportunities. Dues are $155 a year.

GET READY FOR NEW TOP-LEVEL DOMAINS

Two new general top-level domains (gTLDs) targeted to business and commercial users, .biz and .info, were just announced by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that governs Internet domain names. These two top-level domains, which should be available for use as early as September, 2001, are the first since .com, .net, .org and others debuted in the mid-1980s.

Of the seven new gTLDs that will be introduced over the next year, (.biz, .info, .pro, .name, .aero, .coop, and .museum), the rollouts of the .biz and .info are to serve as 'proof of concept" procedures for how these new domain extensions will be introduced.

It is important to note that each of the seven new gTLDs will have it's own registry company. Registries are the companies that are in charge of the administration and records for a gTLD. Registrars, (i.e. Network Solutions) are the people in charge of taking registration requests fro the end-users on behalf of the Registries.

Most significant to ETB's readers is the change in how .biz domain name requests will be handled, as not only is it the first gTLD to finalize an agreement with ICANN, but it is exclusively for bona fide business entities. NeuLevel, the domain name registrar for .biz, has introduced a three-step registration process:

1. From now until August 6, 2001, companies can submit Trademark Claim Forms (TCF), designed to help them protect their trademarks and service marks.
2. Starting September 17, 2001, companies can begin applying for .biz domain names. If a company files for a .biz domain name that is protected by a TCF, they will be alerted to this fact before they can proceed any farther with the registration process. In addition, the holder of the TCF on that name receives an e-mail message, alerting them that someone else is trying to register it.
3. On or around October 10, 2001 the new .biz domain names will go live on the Internet.

Afilias.com, the registry for the .info domain, will also include a phased roll out. Theirs includes three different periods - the Sunrise Period, the Startup Period, and the Post-Start Up Period.

The Sunrise period will allow for IP (intellectual property) holders to make registration claims on the new domains. Registration of .info domain names will be open to the general public during the Start-Up period. The Post-Start-Up period will begin after the original queues of request from the previous two periods have been randomly processed. Post-Start-Up registrations will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis in real time.

Afilias has not finalized their agreement with ICANN as of yet, but once they do, roll out is expected with 45 days of the agreement.

Additionally, it is perhaps even more important to note that each Registry will have their own policies for dealing with Trademark and Intellectual Property disputes. For .biz and .info they are called the "Start-up Trademark Opposition Policy" (STOP) and "The Sunrise Challenge", respectively.

The introduction of the .biz domain name creates a valuable new opportunity to extend your company's presence on the Web - especially if you weren't able to get your first choice .com domain name. But in order to leverage this opportunity, you must file TCFs for your company's trademarks and service marks now, or risk losing control of them to unscrupulous "cybersquatters."

TREND: GROWTH OF JAVA APPLICATIONS

Sun Microsystems

As the Internet evolves from a PC centric network to one in which many different kinds of devices are interconnected, Java is emerging as the preferred computer language for developing software applications. Java has the advantage of being interoperable on many different computing platforms and operating systems.

When Sun Microsystems developed Java, its' vision was to create a programming language that enabled developers to "write once, run anywhere." This would permit the same set of software code to be quickly and easily deployed on everything from desktop PCs and PDAs to industrial computing devices. In its early days, Java failed to live up to this promise. But now it has reached a level of maturity that makes it an ideal programming language for application and database servers, where functions must often be integrated across several computers. Because it is written around open Internet standards, it also offers a high level of security that meets the needs of today's e-business applications.

Java can give developers more time to develop powerful new business applications, rather than investing countless hours creating platform specific adaptations of existing ones. And it clearly has a head start in cutting-edge e-business applications like peer-to-peer networking. We recommend keeping an eye on Java as a potential platform for deploying your next generation of business applications.

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That's all for now! I welcome your comments and feedback on the Executive Technology Briefing, which will help me to focus it even more closely on your needs.

Jordan Ayan
President
Create-It! Inc.