General Research

• www.SEC.gov Securities and Exchange Commission – provides information on top officers and key players in public companies.

• www.10Kwizard.com The 10k’s proprietary search technology lets users view SEC filings of more than 68,000 companies, plus search historical filings by key words, phrases, and names.

• www.bizstats.com Business Statistics – Instant access to useful financial ratios, business statistics and benchmarks for small businesses.

• www.edgarscan.pwcglobal.com EdgarScan is an interface to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (SEC EDGAR) Filings. EdgarScan pulls filings from the SEC’s servers and parses them automatically to find key financial tables and normalize financials to a common format that is comparable across companies. Using hyperlinks we can go directly to specific sections of the filing, including the financial statements, footnotes, extracted financial data and computed ratios. Benchmarking Assistant performs graphical financial benchmarking interactively.

• www.corporateinformation.com This site provides detailed information on public companies. Registration is free, but required.

• www.Hoovers.com Provides information on about 12 million companies, including salaries of top executives and board members. There is plenty of good free information here in addition to premium subscription based information.

• http://wsjie.ar.wilink.com/ WS Journal Annual Report Service provides free annual reports for many publicly owned corporations.

• www.prars.com The Public Register’s Annual Report Service will mail you a free annual report within one business day.

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Public Records Research

• www.SearchSystems.net Search Systems provides access to more than 38,000 searchable public records databases. Visitors can search by type of database or search databases by state, nationally or internationally.

• www.BRBPub.com/pubrecsites.asp BRB Publications Inc. – links to nearly 1,700 county, state and federal web addresses where users can access public records such as real estate records, criminal records, driving records and more.

• www.NETROnline.com/public_records.htm NETR Real Estate Research & Information – starting point for looking up real estate records. Offers a portal of real estate databases online, accessible by clicking on the state and then the company.

• www.INDOrgs.Virginia.edu/portico/home.html University of Virginia’s Portico – links collected by the university to help higher education fundraising researches and other nonprofit organizations. Databases include property records, births, marriages and divorces.

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Product and Vendor Research

• www.business.com Business.com is a search engine for finding business products and service providers.

• Reviews.CNET.com CNET Reviews – a well designed site offering a broad range of product and user reviews. Provided by CNET Networks Inc, a leading global media company informing and connecting the buyers, users and sellers of technology.

• www.ConsumerReports.org Consumer Reports – a nonprofit testing and information organization. This is a subscription site – $24/year ($19 for magazine subscribers).

• www.ConsumerSearch.com Consumer Search claims to find the best reviews, analyze the pics and then indentifies the best products.

• www.leonardsguide.com/ Leonard’s Guide – comprehensive online information on transportation brokers, freight forwarders, warehouse/trucking companies, and other industry service providers. They offer a free trial, but subscription fees are required for longer term usage.

• www.thomasnet.com Thomas Register is the most comprehensive online resource for finding companies and products manufactured in North America where you can: 1) Place orders online, 2) View and download millions of Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings, and 3) View thousands of online company catalogs and websites.

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Periodicals, Journals and Publication Research

• http://scholar.google.com/ Google Scholar provides a familiar google search interface for international academic journals and publications. Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.

• www.bizjournals.com Bizjournals provides local business news from American City’s print edition. Their archives contain more than 1.25 million articles since 1996. This is a great tool to research your prospects.

• www.findarticles.com 10 million published articles, which are constantly updated. This site contains articles back to 1998 from more than 300 magazine and journals. Thousands of articles can be read in its entirety and printed at no cost.

• www.gale.com Thomsan Gale is a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.

• www.gutenberg.net If a book is in the public domain, it is probably located (in it’s entirety) at the Project Gutenberg.

• journalistexpress.com JournalistExpress – Prime information gathering resource provides links to online references, databases and other valuable tools – as well as major newspapers.

• http://books.google.com/ Google Books has partnered with many libraries around the world and is on a mission to scan all books and make them searchable online.

• www.questia.com Questia – Represents itself to be “The World’s Largest Online Library” and provides 24/7 access to the world’s largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, plus magazine and newspaper articles. For example, over 420 books, 37 journal articles, and 30 magazine articles, online covering different aspects of Evangelicalism and fundraising.

• www.technorati.com Technorati indexes and ranks blogs throughout the web. See what people online are talking about, what the current buzz is about.

• Other sources for periodicals and journal research can be found in News Web Links .

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Technology Research Tools

• www.brint.com Use for business research in information and technology. They claim “if they don’t have it, you don’t need it.”

• www.forrester.com Forrester Research – identifies and analyzes emerging trends in technology and their impact on business.

• http://poptech.org/ – PopTech – “A community of innovators dedicated to accelerating people, projects, and ideas at the edge of change.”

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Reference

• http://glossarist.com/glossaries/business/ Looking for a definition for a business term or acronym — you’ll find all you need on this site.

• www.google.com The most widely used search engine on the Internet. Their widespread adoption has been largely attributed to their simple interface as well as their accuracy for finding relevant information.

• www.culsty.com A lesser known search engine that delivers the typical results page as well as sub-categories (or clusters) for the results. This approach makes it easier to find useful information that might be on the tenth page of a typical search engines results.

• www.archive.org Internet Archive – a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Their Wayback Machine stores copies of what significant portions of the web USED to look like. This can be particularly useful when researching what a company used to say about a given product or service.

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Web 2.0 Based Research Tools

• http://del.icio.us/ Looking for a good web site resource? Get the recommendation from others at Delicious. People around the world categorize (tag in Web 2.0 speak) their favorite web sites.

• www.wikipedia.org The fastest growing free encyclopedia on the web. It covers technology concepts and trends, historical facts and figures, geography and much more. It is maintained by volunteers collaborating around the world. In fact, if there’s a definition that you think needs correcting or needs to be added, you too can sign up to contribute content on this site.

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Other Useful Research Tools

• www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures Monthly values of the global temperature of the lower atmosphere, complied at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at this website.

• www.creativegood.com/publications Creative Good provides customer usability services. Their site has several very useful and free reports on why and how to pay attention to customer processes.

• www.api.org American Petroleum Institute – information about oil and natural gas for the general public, professionals and policy makers; puts out closely watched weekly inventory reports.

• http://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm — Glassdoor is your free inside look at jobs and companies. Salary details, company reviews, and interview questions — all posted anonymously by employees and job seekers.

• www.opec.org The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – made up of eleven developing nations, who economies rely on oil exports revenues. It is a permanent, intergovernmental Organization, created at the Baghdad Conference on September 10–14, 196