Idoruby –
Thank you for the interesting question!
There were about 575,000 new businesses started in 2001, according to
the Small Business Administration (and there were more closures and
bankruptcies than that last year the SBA says). Dun & Bradstreet
published numbers on startups until mid-2000. For the first half of
that year D&B tracked 62,549 startups; 5,237 of them in information
technology (computers and communications).
The largest lists of startups will be those coming from the Secretary
of State, which registers every company doing business in a state.
The companies might be inactive or even non-profit firms – or they
might be doing business outside your area of interest. Some states
offer search facilities for types of companies, which would allow you
to search for particular business areas or possibly even newly
incorporated concerns. Here, for example, is the State of
Washington's "Corporations Search" page:
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/corps/search.aspx
Checking with Dun & Bradstreet is a second option. D&B usually starts
to collect credit information as soon as companies have any type of
trade relationships. These reports rely on information provided by
the company and some information provided by creditors. In D&B's "
Target the Right Markets with Direct Mail" they recommend selecting
companies by 'start date' to get the newest firms:
http://www.dnb.com/communities/marketing/resource_center/target_markets/0,3572,3-223-1012-0,00.html
If you are seeking companies which have achieved a certain level of
funding, it would be wise to use resources tracking venture capital.
Though venture capital and private equity funding is down
substantially from 2000 and 2001, there were still 1,059 venture
financings in the first half of this year, according to Venture One
Corp. in their report "Equity Financings for Venture-Backed Companies,
by Industry Group" (July, 2002):
http://www.ventureone.com
This company has at three newsletters tracking private capital funds;
health care funds and high-technology (computer) funds, as Venture
One's "Newsletters" page shows:
http://www.assetnews.com/products/news/index.htm
An alternate strategy for tracking new companies would be to use a
news service like Google News or Dow-Jones and screen companies using
"startup" and other keywords to focus on industries that you're
seeking. (Beware: using "startup" alone will get information on
Windows 'startup' folders and first-time sales offers!) The news
service screening should probably be done on a more-frequent basis, as
a weekly look at Google News will produce several hundred references
to startup businesses.
The Google search strategy can be used for each state, for example:
"secretary of state" + Washington + corporations
Other search strategies include:
"venture capital"
"Dun & Bradstreet"
Best regards,
Omnivorous-GA |
