Resources of the Week: International Finance and Investing
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
We are offering this week's compilation of resources in conjunction with a review of EIU's World Investment Service, which will appear in the June issue of VIP, another Free Pint publication. While EIU's service is subscription-based, the selection of sites here provide -- in the ResourceShelf tradition -- mostly free information.
globalEDGE™ is a knowledge web-portal that connects international business professionals worldwide to a wealth of information, insights, and learning resources on global business activities. Partially funded by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI B grant, globalEDGE™ is your source for global business knowledge. The site offers:
For obvious reasons, we have a special fondness for resources that are created and maintained by libraries. An excellent example is VIBES (Virtual International Business & Economic Sources), from the J. Murrey Atkins Library, University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
VIBES provides over 3,000 links to Internet sources of international business and economic information that are in English and available free of charge.
Browse at the comprehensive, regional or national level. Sites with a little American flag icon are from the U.S. government. Sites with a little EU flag icon are from the.... You get the picture.
Also near the top of our list is Site-By-Site!, which self-identifies as "The International Investment Portal & Research Center." Essentially, this is an aggregator of links and information from a wide range of other sites; you'll find daily market data, news, economic statistics, research, analysis and commentary. The site is generally well-organized -- basic navigation down the lefthand side, news and information about the G8 countries down the middle, and world economic information down the righthand side. The site is searchable via Google.
Speaking of the G8 countries, the University of Toronto Libraries -- along with the G8 Research Group at the university's Munk Center for International Studies -- provides a comprehensive G8 Information Center. You'll find news, conference and meeting announcements, official documents, papers and reports, etc. Besides English, the site is available in French, Russian, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Chinese.
This site offers best practice public policy advice for private sector led growth and financial market development in developing countries. Find expert analysis, powerful databases, quick solutions, and comprehensive "how-to" guides.
The IMF is an international organization of 185 member countries. It was established to promote international monetary cooperation, exchange stability, and orderly exchange arrangements; to foster economic growth and high levels of employment; and to provide temporary financial assistance to countries to help ease balance of payments adjustment.
Now you know.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) "is a unique forum where the governments of 30 market democracies work together to address the economic, social and governance challenges of globalisation as well as to exploit its opportunities."
The U.S. Commercial Services's Market Research Library, one of Gary's favorites mentioned in last week's ROTW, offers an extremely useful set of Country Commercial Guides. (Note to Mac users; the site is not Safari-friendly, but it seems to work OK with Firefox.)
Don't overlook Yahoo! Finance Worldwide. You'll find links to localized sites for many different countries, in the native languages.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
