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.) [snip...] -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Hacker News Network [www.hackernews.com]
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