| page 2 previous page A site at www.europages.net, maintained by Euredit SA, allows a search for companies that provide products or services in Europe. You can also search by company name. No information could be found on a company using Venture in its name that seems likely to link the company with Venture Industries. Another site for gaining preliminary company information is the Yahoo site uk.finance.yahoo.com. This site has a worldwide database. At this point, after using the above websites, you should know whether a company is a public or private (or possibly subsidiary or foreign) company. This unfortunately means that if the company you are seeking information on is a private, smaller company (the overwhelming majority of existing companies), you do not yet have much information, if any (unless it is one of the private companies that shows up in Hoover’s, etc.). If your company is one of these private, smaller companies, it becomes, at this point, a higher probability that you will not find much financial, and possibly any other type of information on the company. But you should not give up yet in your use of the Internet. At the Better Business Bureau (BBB) site, www.bbb.org, you can search BBB’s database for company information. This database can provide preliminary company information, and has many smaller, private companies in its database. No negative information on Venture Industries could be found in the Better Business Bureau database. Another database of private (and public) companies is at www.corptech.com. This database focuses on what the site’s maintainer, One Source Information Services, Inc., considers “high tech”, smaller public and private companies. The site claims to have more than 50,000 companies in the database. Very preliminary information can be found without registration. Registration (which is free) allows access to more information. But the most extensive information available requires substantial fees. Only information on Venture Industries’ facility in Seabrook, New Hampshire (formerly the Bailey Corporation) could be found. Most, but not all, states make available a lot of information (usually free) about companies doing business in their state. A good site to go to access a state’s on-line information is www.llrx.com/columns/roundup19.htm. This site not only gives you access to the state’s on-line databases, it will tell you what is available for each state. Going to Michigan and searching found that Venture Industries was incorporated in 1974. InfoSpace, Inc. maintains this site www.infospace.com, which offers yellow and white page searching, searching on a telephone number (if this is all you have) to match to a company name, companies located close to a given address, e-mail addresses given a company name, and maps and directions. Telephone numbers and addresses for many of Venture Industries' sites in Michigan are easily found using the Yellow Pages. Searching on plastics-related companies within a 30 mile radius of Ventures Industries headquarter's zip code (48026) returns a very interesting result. Thee are dozens of companies related to plastic molding and extrusion technologies in this area. A cluster of liked-companies is a very supportive environment for all the companies in the cluster. At this point, I would turn to a good search engine, such as Yahoo Search at www.search.yahoo.com. If you know the name of the company but not the website’s name, you should be able to fairly easily find the website on Google, if the website has been indexed by Google. However, many company websites are not indexed by Google, and their website will not be easy to find using Google. If you cannot find the company website using Google, I would suggest going to the Whois.net site www.whois.net. This site is a database of domain names that have been registered (domain names have to be registered). You are likely to find the company’s website name if you search at this site. A company website, especially for a smaller company for which you have no other information, should be very valuable for preliminary information, and is important to find. A search engine like Google potentially has a lot to offer about a company than just the company’s website and its information, especially for smaller companies. Google is very efficient at quickly searching data on the Internet, and can return unexpected results. Google should be searched using various combinations of appropriate search terms to mine as much information as possible about the company you are searching that Google has to give. A search at Google using the search term “Venture Industries” returned 2,450 hits. Thee is a potential for a large amount of useful information in these hits. Another important source of information, which should be very helpful in providing preliminary (as well as detailed) information on companies, is on-line news sources. This may be for many, especially smaller companies, one of the best Internet sources. www.newspaperlinks.com/home.cfm, maintained by the Newspaper Association of America, has links to hundreds of newspapers in the United States and Canada. Most on-line newspapers probably have an on-line search feature (although some papers may charge for access to the search results). Connecting to a newspaper in the company’s geographical locations might give information about the company. For example, we know (from the Hoover search described above) that Venture Industries headquarters is in Fraser, Michigan. Fraser is in Macomb County (information quickly obtained on the Internet) and a newspaper that can be linked to from www.newspapaerlinks.com/home.cfm is the Macomb Daily. Searching for articles on Venture Industries finds information on the Venture Industries bankruptcy situation. The Venture Industries bankruptcy problems apparently relates to its German subsidiary, according to Macomb Daily information. Another website with links to newspapers, not only in the US, but world wide, is www.onlinenewspapers.com, maintained by Web Wombat Pty Ltd. Google maintains a site at www.news.google.com into which news releases from various news organizations are continuously fed. A database of past news releases can be searched. A search at this site on “Venture Industries” gave back information that the CEO of Venture Industries resigned on June 5, 2003, only after 2 months on the job. Other articles deal with Venture Industries planning a new manufacturing plant in northeast Alabama. Now a brief review - I would use the above sites, more or less in the order given, to accumulate available company information from these sites. You should be able to go through the above search "process" fairly easily and quickly. One final site, that is a “mega “ site, and might take a little more research time, is one that offers many links to sites with company information. This site is the Rutgers University site www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/busi/company.shtml. I would conclude my preliminary searching at this site, if sufficient preliminary information about a company has not yet surfaced in one of the above sites. This Rutgers University “mega” site has useful to me links to directories that list businesses. There are also links to state offices that register companies and have databases on the companies, and there are links to other lists that identify private companies. The Rutgers site has several lists, some of which can be automatically searched, of companies with websites. These lists often give you access to the company website. Several on-line “yellow pages”, covering the United States, and other countries, could be a valuable source to find or verify preliminary information on a private company. One business directory link at the Rutgers site is - Business and Economy: Directories: Companies (Yahoo) - a useful link that not only takes you to a search engine that searches directories but also leads you to a list of links that takes you to information on companies. Searching on Venture Industries in one of these “yellow pages” provides address information for sites in Hartford City, Indiana; Hopkinsville, Kentucky; Almont, Michigan; Clinton Township, Michigan; and Fraser, Michigan. All of these locations are known to be locations for Venture Industries facilities. Several links on the Rutgers page take you to sites intended to provide foreign company information. There are “yellow pages” and other sites available for many countries. Unfortunately, this “international” list of links seems to be concentrated on Asia and the Middle East, but other regions (e.g. Europe) have links provided. From the Rutgers University site, you can link to Thomas Global Register and Thomas Register (US companies and Canada). Both are massive databases, and require registration, which is free, to use. I find the databases time-consuming to use for searching, using products as the search strategy. For example, using Thomas Global you can find a lot of companies that make a product that you are interested in, but it takes time to sort through the information, because usually you will find so many companies. Searching on the terms “automotive injection molded plastic components”, a term that well-defines Venture Industries products, returned 650 categories of products, and thousands of companies you can turn to buy products in these 650 categories. Click here to go to next page. |
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