Business Blog

Baruch College has a very nice tutorial called the Beginner’s Guide to Business Research. It is a professionally designed, flash-based tutorial that covers many of the basics for beginning research. The “Introduction” and “Using Company Websites” can be particularly useful for any researcher. The “Using Library Databases” section discusses using three different databases that Baruch subscribes to, but Ohio University Libraries  subscribes to only one of the databases demonstrated (Hoover’s Online). Nevertheless, it is definitely worth checking out. [Link via ILLoC]

Baruch also has a Guide to Financial Statements. Both tutorials were designed by Kognito Solutions LLC, a professional design firm owned and managed by Baruch alumni.

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The Digital Music Report for 2006 has been released. Highlights from the facts and figures page:

• Record company revenues (trade revenues) reached $US 1.1 billion in 2005 showing a threefold increase on 2004 ($US 380 million).
• Digital music (online and mobile) represents approximately 6% of overall music sales
• Mobile music sales are not far behind online, with revenues roughly split (60-40 as at H1 2005).
• 420 million single tracks were downloaded in 2005 globally – more than double the number downloaded in 2004 (156 million).
  
  US: 353 million single tracks downloaded (up from 143 million) [Nielsen SoundScan]
  UK: 26.4 million single tracks downloaded (up from 5.8 million) [OCC]
  Germany: estimated 21 million single tracks downloaded (up from 6.4 million) [IFPI Germany]
  France: estimated 8 million single tracks downloaded (up from 1.5 million) [SNEP]
• The number of users of subscription services, such as Rhapsody and Napster, increased from 1.5 to 2.8 million globally in 2005.
• Online song catalogues doubled to over 2 million tracks on the major services.
• Globally there are now over 335 legitimate online services, up from 230 in 2004 and 50 two years ago. In Europe alone the number of services reached 200 in 2005, up from 150 in 2004.
• Mobile sales in Japan totalled $US 211 million, or 96% of digital sales in the market, in the first nine months of 2005. Single track downloads reached 4.3 million during the period.
• Mobile phone subscriptions reached 1.5 billion in 2005 – a 50% increase on 2002.
• Globally there is an estimated 70 million subscribers to 3G. Jupiter estimates that by 2010 3G penetration will reach 60% in Europe.
• Satellite radio subscriptions reached over 9 million in the US alone – three times as many as the number of global subscription services users. Over 475 million people globally receive Digital Audio Broadcast services (DAB).
• The number of infringing music files available on the internet at any one time is estimated at 885 million. This is slightly up on January 2005 (870 million) but down compared to June 2005 (900 million). By contrast, broadband uptake rose by 26% in the past year. Total infringing music files are down 20% on the 1.1 billion peak in April 2003.

The full PDF report is available here.

[Link via Resource Shelf. ]

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Business researchers often have a hard time getting started with company and industry research .  I suppose this is mainly due to the overwhelming ammount of information available.  This abundance of information can often contribute to unfocused search strategies and information overload.   In an attempt to help with this problem, I’ve created the Company Research Basics and Industry Research Basics guides, which can be found in the Biz Wiki.  These guides are designed to help the business researcher learn what type of information is available, and where to look to find the information.  I hope that business researchers will find these guides useful.  If you have an questions, comments, or feedback, please feel free to contact me.

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The Business Blog may look a little weird for a while.  As part of the renovation of the library website, I am changing the looks of all of the library blogs and I’ll be using the Business Blog to test various templates.  Thank you for your patience during this process.

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Fortune has released the 100 Best Companies to Work for. Get the full list here.

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