Business Analytic tools

I am in the process of evaluation tools from Thompson to look at company sizes, financials etc...

The first is for public companies, and just really aggregates a lot of information in one place. Called "Thompson Financial Banker".

It is useless. The information in it is wrong. I can speak, in depth, about our own company. We got a new CFO a while ago, and they still have the old name. Even Yahoo has it right. Yahoo is free, and this is expensive.

Second. "Thompson VentureX". This is worse than useless. It has a little bit of information in it, and I guess it is good for folks in some other line of business, but for me it is not. It doesn't list ANY of the companies I am looking at these days. Not one... So I guess it is no good for companies under $10M in size.

Now along comes Alacra with its decision to put an a la carte front end on a lot of different databases. At $150 a shot for much of it, I don't think I will be a big buyer. I like the idea, but the problem is that once you get in to it you see that the data is complete crap. I guess if you have no idea about a company it is a good starting place, but your really are better searching full text on company filings and looking at what they REALLY said to the SEC. The aggregators are running so far behind as to be absolutly useless.

Saw this new one on A VC , a blog that is pretty interesting. It is one of his porfolio companies, and I like the idea. For getting this kind of data, I will probably do it this way. I will probably do the full text searching of the EDGAR data first though....