Green Technologies & Practices - August 2011

About three-quarters of business establishments reported the use of at least one green technology or practice during August 2011, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Green technologies and practices (GTP) are those that lessen the environmental impact of an establishment’s operations. About 854,700 jobs, representing approximately 0.7 percent of total U.S. employment, were held by workers
who spent more than half of their time involved in green technologies and practices in August 2011. Over one-quarter of these GTP jobs were in building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations or in installation, maintenance, and repair occupations.

These data are from the Green Technologies and Practices survey, a survey of business establishments designed to collect data on establishments’ use of green technologies and practices and the occupations of workers who spend more than half of their time involved in green technologies and practices.

Degrees in business conferred

Degrees in business conferred by degree-granting institutions, by level of degree and sex of student: 1955–56 through 2006–07

Doing Business

The Doing Business project "provides objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 183 economies and selected cities at the subnational and regional level." As hillsearch.org puts it, DB, since 2003, "covers 10 indicator sets/topics in 181 economies at the sub-national and regional levels. The indicator sets/topics span the business lifecycle and include: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, employing workers, registering property, getting credit, protecting investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, infrastructure, enforcing contracts, and closing a business.
"You can also use Doing Business to access more in-depth information on rankings, gender laws, reformers, business laws, and more."

Bloomberg Businessweek Company Insight Center

When the press release is right, it's right:

The Web offers investors a rich trove of information. But it has little value in today's fast-paced business environment if you can't quickly find the nuggets you need. That's why BusinessWeek is launching the Company Insight Center on BusinessWeek.com.

The CIC, or Companies Channel, combines our resources with those of Standard & Poor's (MHP) Capital IQ division (like BusinessWeek, a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP)) to pull together up to 33 pages of data, charts, profiles, and news stories on each of 42,000 public companies in the U.S. and abroad. The result: an unparalleled array of corporate data.

CIC offers easy navigation to get you from, say, stock price charts that you can customize; to earnings reports and estimates; to profiles of chief executives and board members; to a history of their stock trades. Also available are reports on some 320,000 private companies, though since they're private, the data are more limited.

Want to know what boards—public, private, and nonprofit—those execs and directors sit on? The People page in the Companies Channel can show you that. As you click on each board member, you can see the other members of the board and their affiliations. Click on any of those directors, and you see their other boards and who else sits on them, and so on. You won't find this feature, a proprietary service from Capital IQ, anywhere else on the Web without paying a hefty fee.

There are several ways to get to the CIC pages. From the BusinessWeek.com home page, click on the Companies tab on the navigation bar. You'll also find a stock quote search box on all pages that will take you to the Snapshot page for whatever company you type in. In addition, all ticker symbols and mentions of companies in BusinessWeek.com stories will link to that company's Snapshot, which is a compendium of market-related data, company news, and biographical and compensation info on top executives. Similarly, executives' names in online stories will link to their CIC profiles.

Census Data Can Impact Your Business Strategy

April 1 is National Census Day and by now we should all have received, completed, and returned our 2010 Census forms. Because just by answering 10 simple questions, we can all directly affect the quality of life, services, and job creation in our communities. To help ensure communities are counted, the U.S. Census Bureau is asking small businesses to voluntarily raise awareness and advocate the importance of the 2010 Census with its 2010 Census Partner Program.

READ MORE.

Annual Report Service

From Hill Library:

Are you looking for information on a public company? A good place to start is with the company's annual report.
Use Annual Report Service to search for a company's annual report. Annual Report Service claims to be "the largest...directory of online annual reports." Not only can you access reports online, you can request free copies of the printed reports as well.
Annual Report Service allows you to search by symbol or name, or you can browse the alphabetical list of companies. You can also search by industry or US state, and the database currently contains 559 Canadian companies.

Business Dynamics Statistics

Noted by our colleagues at the Hill Library:

Where can you find data on how many US businesses open and close each year and the impact this has on the economy? Where can you track firm age, firm size, and firm performance over time at state and national levels?

The Census Bureau recently launched Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) to track the changing landscape of entrepreneurial activity in the United States. BDS tracks business activity, annual changes in employment, and growing and shrinking businesses. It includes unique information on firm age and firm size and tracks firms over time. BDS currently includes data for 1976-2005.

So use Business Dynamics Statistics today to access data for your industry or region.

TradeVibes Company Search

From the J.J. Hill library.

Looking for detailed information on private companies, such as funding source, number of employees, names of key decision makers, and competitor listings? Good luck. This type of information is generally locked in the realm of expensive databases.

But TradeVibes isn't expensive. In fact, it's free. And it brings together just this type of detailed information on thousands of private companies throughout the consumer Web, technology, and advertising industries. There's that fairly strict industry focus, but if you're looking for data on a Web-savvy company, you'll likely find it here.

The site is built on a wiki platform, so anyone can contribute, but that makes it all the better as a good starting place for tech company research.

How to turn Census data into business knowledge

That's the provocative title of this article from the J.J. Hill library blog. It links to an Ad Age article about The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer.

Agricultural Stats

A librarian friend of mine, who used to work at the NYS Small Business Development Center, e-mailed me Starting an Agriculture Business. I mention it here because the early pages discuss the great import of agriculture in the Empire State, a fact I suspect people from other parts of the country would be surprised by.

Business Intelligence Resources

"A Subject Tracer™ Information Blog developed and created by Internet expert, author, keynote speaker and consultant Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. for monitoring business intelligence resources and sites on the Internet" located here. Some are links to paid sites, but most are free.