LLRXBuzz – April 9, 2001

Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.



In This Issue:

Lexis-Nexis Launches CorporateAffiliations.com

eLaw.com Partners to Create Environmental Library

IHS Now Offers Fire Codes to Online Subscribers

Pennsylvania Releases Public Schools Information

Dow Jones Launches StartupJournal.com

Google Offers Translation, Adds New Interface Languages

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Lexis-Nexis Launches CorporateAffiliations.com

Lexis-Nexis has announced the launching of CorporateAffiliations.com, its worldwide database of companies, subsidiaries and affiliates. Using the “who owns whom” hierarchy, ownership can be tracked to the eighth level of private and public companies. Company information includes a company snapshot, related news and pertinent legal issues.

At the site, note the link to Mergers and Acquisitions on the left. It provides an alphabetical list of “who did what,” with an archive that dates back to 1976. The front page of this is just an alphabetical list of M&A’s in very tiny type (whew). It looks like the front page listing contains just those M&A’s that took place this year. To get more, click on Archives. You’ll be taken to a much longer list of M&A’s, browsable by letter. The archival list is undated.

To get more information than this you’ll need to have a subscription (subscriptions are available in an annual printed version, a quarterly CD-ROM format, or a Web version with weekly updates.) There’s also a seven-day free trial available, as long as you’re willing to slog through a terms of service page and provide your name, company, address, phone number, and e-mail.

eLaw.com Partners to Create Environmental Library

During the second quarter of 2001, eLaw.com plans to release a Environmental Practice Area Library. Content on the site will be provided by several law firms who, in turn, will be able to showcase their work to the Web site subscriber base of legal professionals.

Subscribers will have access to practice resources, such as briefs, agreements, and forms to search, preview, and download. You can check out the press release on this at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010402/0067.html.

IHS Now Offers Fire Codes to Online Subscribers

IHS Engineering’s subscribers will now be able to acquire an online subscription to the National Fire Protection Association national fire codes and
handbooks. The product had been offered only as a portion of a CD-ROM subscription. IHS customers who may not have a NFPA subscription can acquire individual documents from IHS’s Global Engineering Documents at
http://www.global.ihs.com.

Pennsylvania Releases Public Schools Information

PR Newswire: April 4, 2001. Pennsylvania now provides profiles of the state’s public and private schools from its Web site at http://www.state.pa.us. The profiles have been updated with 1999-2000 school year information, including enrollment-stability numbers on students, the length of school days, and statistics on the experience and degrees of teachers. Also included in the new profiles is financial information, staffing programs, library resources, and the school’s performance of standardized testing.

From the state’s Powerport site, the link to school profiles is in the right column under What’s Hot in PA, or go directly http://www.paprofiles.org/. The
information is in an Access database from which district-level or school-based tables can opened or downloaded. From this site you may also search by county, map, and word. If you’re interested in getting statistics without going through Access, you can choose the “interactive” portion of the site, which allows you to select a school year, school level, and whether you want a report of indicators broken down by schools or schools broken down by indicator.

… that’s the theory, anyway. I tried several different ways to access the information in this section and got database errors every single time. If you have my luck you’ll have to download the Access files.

[Editor’s Note: Please see Kathy Biehl’s April 2, 2001 Web Critic column <//www.llrx.com/columns/webcritic8.htm> for additional analysis about PA Powerport.]

Dow Jones Launches StartupJournal.com

According to Dow Jones’s new Web site for entrepreneurs, StartupJournal.com, nearly 80% of startup businesses fold within the first five years. The free site features sources for starting businesses like researching the market and securing financing. Additional features include a tool for developing business plans and access to databases listing
franchise opportunities and venture capital.

http://StartupJournal.com/ offers several features. There’s a toolkit to create a mini-business plan as well as a trademark search. (These two items look like
third-party content that Dow Jones has licensed.) There are several columnists covering topics like marketing strategies and startup questions. Articles cover issues including financing, technology, and franchising. There’s lots to see here. Worth a look.

Google Offers Translation, Adds New Interface Languages

Google has started offering machine translation of their search results. (Machine translation just means that the translation is done automatically, with a computer. Machine translation is nowhere near perfect, and should be relied on only to get the “gist” of a page you can’t read.)

This new feature, which is in beta, is integrated into Google in two ways. The first is in the search results. All search results in Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese will have a “translate this page” link beside them. Click on it and you’ll get a translated page framed by Google. There’s a link to a printable
version as well.

(If you don’t see a “translate this page” link on your result page, go back and check your preferences. If you have “Search only these selected languages” checked, and none of the languages are the ones named in the last paragraph, you won’t see the “translate this page” link.)

Google’s integrated the translation directly into their search results. Check out the preferences page. You can now specify that you want titles and page summaries in Spanish, German, French and Portuguese translated directly on the results page. You can read more about Google’s translation options at
http://www.google.com/machine_translation.html.

While we’re talking about languages on Google I’ll also mention that Google now has 30 language interface options, with the addition of Galician, Estonian,
Greek, Irish, Polish, Tagalog, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Serbian.

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