ResearchBuzz

There’s a new service for both locating airports or seaports worldwide. It is a subscription service, however ($17.95 a month). It’s located at http://www.findaport.net .

The site encompasses 1200 airports and 1000 “major” seaports. You can do a search by specifying a country or a city. Then you get a list of available ports, maps, and Web sites. Unfortunately, you can do no searching at all — not even to get teaser information — without logging in. You can’t even pay $5 for a sample search. I was initially interested in this site because I’ve been dealing a lot with freight considerations at work. But I’m not getting enough of a taste of the site to make a decision on the subscription service.

There’s a new database of Delaware business licenses available, but instead of a government agency administering it, it’s being put together by the Wilmington, Delaware News Journal. You can access it at http://php.delawareonline.com/business/search.php .

You can search by business name, city/town, and zip code, or you can search by business category (very broad) or subcategory (very narrow.) Doing a search for Elmer found a stack of results presented in a table that includes name, trade name, address, and category.

Most of the listings are hyperlinked. If you click on one you’ll get a map of where the business is as well as a little additional information if available, including license number and the license expiration date.

One caveat: this is being maintained by a third party and not the state government. It’ll be updated weekly, not daily as you might expect.

More and more resources that I would imagine as regular Web sites are now getting Wiki-ized. Wikinvest, at http://www.wikinvest.com/, provides stock information as Wiki. It’s not comprehensive (looks like about 275 companies are listed), but makes good use of the format.

From the front page you can browse company names or concepts (concepts, for the most part, appear to be industries.), but you can also do a search. As I noted, the stock list is not complete — IAC and LOOK do not have articles here. I did a search for YHOO and did get an article page. The Yahoo Page had an overview of the company, several charts related to its growth, usage, and revenue, and a list of related articles and stocks.

An interesting use of the Wiki format is the “Bulls & Bears” section. Bulls can list/edit ways that Yahoo is good investment, while Bears can do the opposite. Stock charts can be annotated with news/releases to show events that have had an impact on the stock price.

The concept pages are similar to the individual stock pages, except of course they don’t include stock charts. However they do include places for bullish and bearish comments and charts relevant to that industry. Not all industries are available, either — I didn’t see anything for mobile advertising, for example.

Editing the wiki requires absolutely no registration — IP addresses will be recorded for anonymous edits. To get a sense of what’s available here you can browse the listed companies or check out the concepts.