http://www.forbes.com/forbes/99/0517/6310322a.htm
The Web can be many thingsadvertising vehicle, retail outlet, mass medium.
And this one: a corporate-intelligence tool.
Is there a snoop on your site?
By Adam L. Penenberg
When consumers first discerned a difference between a URL and a UFO,
companies rushed to the World Wide Web to wage a new kind of corporate
braggadocio. They began offering a digital cache of press releases and
executive bios, job postings and research papers, price lists and details
on strategic alliances.
Information, in short, that a company might think twice about handing over
to a competitor who simply asks for it. But on the Internet, a snoop
doesn't have to ask. As ever more data go digital for easy access at
corporate Web sites and in quasipublic databases, spies are making the
most of it: competitors, tort lawyers and other scary types.
Everybody does it. AlliedSignal, BASF, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., General
Electric, Lockheed Martin, Owens Corning, TRW, Warner-Lambert and Dow
Chemical have gone so far as to hire a sleuthing firm to sift out the
digital skinny. "Information is more important than steel," says Jon
Wikstrom, general manager at MVE Inc., a midsize engineering company that
used the Web to gauge demand for a new type of insulated pipe it was
developing and check whether competitors were working on the same thing.
(It turns out they were.)
"We know our competitors check out our Web site because we track their
domain names," says Michael Renda, a manager of Internet projects at
AlliedSignal. "And, of course, we do the same to them." (Domain names are
part of the URL, or uniform resource locator, that is an Internet
address.)
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-o-
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Received on Wed May 12 18:45:08 1999