Factiva Unveils Competitive Intelligence Tool Suite

Information Today, April, 2000

Factiva has announced the release of the Fuld Competitive Intelligence Center, a competitive intelligence resource. According to the company, this resource is designed to help business professionals, from managers to CEOs, ask the right questions so they can obtain the intelligence they need to make timely, strategic decisions.

The Fuld Competitive Intelligence Center is located in the Ask Dow Jones section of Dow Jones Interactive, and can be accessed through http://www.factiva.com. Dow Jones Interactive, a business intelligence service offered by Factiva, provides global news and in-depth business information to business professionals in many industries. According to the announcement, launching the Fuld Competitive Intelligence Center in the Dow Jones Interactive Web site is part of Factiva's strategy to help businesspeople minimize the time it takes to get answers and maximize the value of the information they obtain.

"This global marketplace, combined with an intense, ever-shifting competitive business environment, has made corporate intelligence a mission-critical necessity," said Clare Hart, president and CEO of Factiva. "As we move into an era where business intelligence--and intelligent management--will make the difference between success and failure, the Fuld Competitive Intelligence Center gives Factiva customers a strategic advantage. This site also reinforces our commitment to arm our customers with relevant and reliable business information, and to provide the tools to help addition, the result cannot be sorted by journal name--a service that can be especially useful when there is a lack of journal-name searching. All in all, however, it is a well-organized, reliably maintained, predictable database with excellent content.

While the world's population keeps exploding, the money for population-related bibliographic projects keeps shrinking. Several of the United Nations Population Fund's free Web services have also been discontinued. Luckily, the free version of POPLINE on Grateful Med is still available, but it will also suffer from the discontinuation of Population Index since that database supplied information to POPLINE. If you swing by Population Index's Web site, fill out the form. It may help resurrect a fine database.

Peter Jacso is associate professor of library and information science at the University of Hawaii's Department of Information and Computer Sciences, and a columnist for Information Today. His e-mail address is jacso@hawaii.edu.