Mini Review: PrivCo
11th September 2012

Searching for financial information on private companies in the US is time-consuming and difficult, simply because private companies don't have to file their accounts with the SEC. This article reviews the PrivCo database, which focuses solely on providing accurate financial, M&A, venture capital and investor information on private companies. It's a rather neat tool that provides a good deal of insight on private companies all in one place, saving users the hassle of conducting multiple searches across an array of databases and social media networks.

Update: A new review of this product is available here »

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FreePint Report: Internal Communications
10th September 2012

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The SharePoint puzzle
7th September 2012

In a recently published report from AIIM (the content management specialists), it's stated that SharePoint 2010 seems to be the Swiss army knife of Enterprise Content Management systems and, as such, seeks to be a lot of things to a lot of people. Is this a strength or a weakness? The report offers some very interesting and surprising insights into current practices and attitudes, and some clear opportunities for information professionals to make their mark.

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Six strategies for improving information management compliance
6th September 2012

As information technology continues to become increasingly embedded in our jobs, organisations will have exponentially more challenges around information compliance. Although individual industries have unique regulations, technologies and challenges, fundamentally, many of the compliance requirements are common. This allows information managers across multiple industries to address compliance challenges in a standard, systematic way. Edsel David looks at six strategies to begin to address these challenges.

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Digging Deeper into Staff Size
5th September 2012

Following high-level discussion of staff sizes for information services and configuration of those services, we take a closer look at the data from 20 interviews and analyse them in terms of average and median staff sizes, average and median numbers of supported staff, and FTEs in information services as a percentage of supported staff. A number of distinctions by tiers emerge as well as industry differences.

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"Just a few moments of electronic idiocy"
4th September 2012

When is it safe to rely on big data and automated analytics, and when should you trust to your insights? Hopefully we can learn a lesson from Knight Capital, which admitted that it had lost millions at the start of just one day’s trading because new software had sent into the market a number of erroneous orders.

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Putting information on the map
3rd September 2012

According to an article in Technology Review earlier this year, we are very much in the midst of the “indoor positioning era”.  GPS has permeated its way in into our day-to-day lives by allowing us to effectively navigate and add value to the outside physical space.  It was inevitable that at some point someone would ask the question: why can’t we do the same with indoor space?

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Mendeley's app platform - a vindication of open access data?
31st August 2012

Mendeley, the self-styled “Wikipedia for academic data” also described as “science’s iTunes”, has recently reached a milestone, according to the company’s blog. The crowd-sourced database, containing around 65 million scientific papers, was set up to liberate research from behind entrenched paywalls. Over 100 million queries per month now come from 240 different apps, with a sharp increase between January and July this year.

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FreePint Report: Information Services Management Monthly Update (August 2012)
30th August 2012

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Winning the social media Olympics
30th August 2012

With the Olympic Games just finished and the Paralympics just starting, it would seem remiss to not take a look at the big winners and losers at what are being described as the first social media Olympics. So which social media tools won gold, silver and bronze at London 2012, and what were some of the lessons learnt?

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