Northwest Research

Qwika is a Wiki search engine. According to its marketing materials, it has translated wikis from 12 languages into English.The engine also includes WikiTravel and aims to include all sizable wikis.

I don’t rely on the Wikipedia for a great deal, but it can be useful when researching individuals whose (large) companies have recently been in the news.

Recently a new researcher I had trained was profiling an individual who was an executive at AOL in the 1990s. The organization was preparing to ask the donor for a major gift. I found the Wikipedia article about the AOL-Time Warner merger for her, which allowed her to understand how the stock had devalued during the Internet bust.

Qwika could be useful when researching businesses and individuals who are based overseas.

I looked at my site statistics today, and found that almost 40% of the visits to this blog are by using a Firefox browser.

I find this very interesting, because many of the sites I use regularly are not set up for Firefox. For example, when using Foundation Search I’ve had to switch over to Internet Explorer, because I am unable to get the site to let me save a window as a text file in Firefox. Other sitesare somewhat illegible in Firefox.

I don’t have Lexis, but I remember that I could never get Lexis to work with Opera, another browser, and I don’t know how if works with Firefox.

I hope vendors and information providers catch up soon. I think my blog readers are pretty representative of the prospect research community as a whole, which means that almost 1/2 of them can’t use many sites without switching browsers.

The Oregonian had an article on “The New Affluence” yesterday. It can be seen here.

The New Face of Affluence

What is most interesting is how many people in this article have earned their money through real estate and how little philanthropy is mentioned.

Hello All–

This isn’t really a prospect research tip, but I thought it was neat anyway.

I’ve been looking for a car on Craig’s List.

I’ve wanted to buy an inexpensive car from a private seller. I prefer a car that has been with a person for a while.

One of the problems of buying a (not very expensive) car on Craigslist is that there are a lot of people who purchase cars from auctions, or salvage cars from junkyards and launder the title.

These people don’t identify as dealers, and they often lie about the cars they do sell. Using Carfax can help show when a car has been sold, etc, but it doesn’t tell anywhere near the whole story.

I discovered that you can use the Craig’s List to search for phone numbers. So for example, if someone has a car you might want to buy you can search the number, in quotes, to see if they have any other cars available. You can also search the number in Google to see if there are any cached car ads, because Google does index most of Craigslist.

I think there may be other interesting uses for phone number searching, besides reverse phone number/address searching.