| Company Sleuth (http://www.companysleuth.com) from Infonautics
Corporation is one of the latest tools available to harness some of the vast
information resources on the Web and to provide the results to subscribers in a useable
form. Announced last fall, it is a free, online business information service. An enhanced
and customized version is available for a company's intranet on a fee basis. The goal of
Company Sleuth is to uncover nuggets of Internet information that will provide the
subscriber with clues to a company's unannounced plans. Although the information uncovered
by Company Sleuth is available to anyone on the Internet, it would not be easily found
using a general search engine or meta-search engine.
Subscribing to Company Sleuth is quick and painless - subscribers are not asked for
much personal information or a credit card number. Each subscriber can choose up to ten  companies to monitor. At this time, only U.S. publicly held
companies are being monitored, but plans are in the works to add privately held companies.
Each day, Company Sleuth sends an e-mail message detailing the number of new items that
have been found in the monitored categories for your ten companies. Customized URLs take
you directly to each company's updated Company Sleuth report. The monitored categories
are:
Internet Domains
Trademarks
Patents 
Federal Litigation
Broker Reports
Analyst Reports
Earnings Whispers
Insider Trading Information
Stock Quote
News
SEC Filings - coming soon
Short Interest
Message Boards
Job Postings
 As a subscriber, you are asked to give your employer's name,
allowing Company Sleuth to provide a Who is Watching Me? report. This report gives a list
of the ten companies with the greatest number of Company Sleuth subscribers who have asked
to monitor your company.
Company Sleuth has marketing and distribution relationships with twelve companies whose
services it monitors daily to provide the above information. Much of the data provided by
Company Sleuth is provided without analysis.
Although Company Sleuth gives a thorough and
up-to-date picture of where a company stands financially, its real strength is allowing  almost-immediate access to closely held information. Information
such as filings for Internet domains, trademarks, patents and new job postings provide
important clues to companies trying to keep abreast of new developments by their
competitors. These types of information are often public record, but were difficult or
time-consuming to obtain.
Daily reports by Company Sleuth frequently provide this information before it is
publicly announced or published. In a November 5, 1998 press release, Company Sleuth touts
that users of its service learned of Amazon.com's registration of three domain names with
TV-related themes -- Amazontv.com, Amazontelevision.com and Amazontube.com -- long before
it was reported on November 2, 1998 by Inter@ctiveWeek Online. 
Company Sleuth is a simple and elegant way to get daily
updates on your favorite companies. Its useful content can actually help you make better
informed financial and business decisions.
by Risa Heywood, Information
Detectives
telephone: (303) 661-0282
fax: (303) 665-0659
email: risah@ibm.net |
