Twenty some years ago, while in Tokyo, I was part of a small team of engineers working on a new digital storage format.  It was a long, 8-month project, as we and a handfull of others negotiated a set of standards for the industry.

Format standardization may sound kind of dull,  but the stakes were actually quite high.  Adopt the right format, and all is well. Make a poor decision, and it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.  (Think Betamax.)

Three companies were involved in the process and all were – and still are – titans in the electronics industry. I won’t divulge the names here for obvious reasons.  But I can tell you this:  We were very close to coming to an agreement. In fact, it was the proverbial eleventh hour, just days before a formal announcement was due, when an errant fax landed on our desks and changed everything.  We weren’t supposed to have seen that fax. It was confidential and mistakenly sent to us by one of the companies in the consortium!

According to the fax, that company was publicly endorsing one format, but secretly intending to adopt and entirely different technology.  We were stunned…and fortunate to get to the truth sooner rather than later.

Companies, like governments, need accurate, regular and speedy intelligence.  Good intelligence allows for smarter decisions and new opportunities.  Fortunately, there are now several online tools which can help you keep a pulse on your competitors and your industry:

• Public Record – Thinking of hiring an applicant?  Deciding on a contractor?  Got a problem customer? A lot of info is available online free of charge.  Using this site you can search traffic criminal and civil case history:  http://www.courts.state.hi.us/

Click on ‘for Litigants’ and then choose ‘Search Court Records’  We use the site for preliminary background checks.

• Google Alerts – Want to monitor whether anyone is infringing on your tradename?  Or need to capture a customer complaint on a blog somewhere before its becomes huge PR problem?  Use Google Alerts to get email daily notices whenever anything relating to your topic or query is posted online: http://www.google.com/alerts It’s useful for tracking people, stories and competitors.  We use it to track how and where ‘SuperGeeks’ hits the internet.

• TinEye – Now you can search without words.  TinEye is a reverse image search engine.   Just upload a photo or insert the image’s link from a website and see where it is being used on the internet.  It’s a good tool to manage proprietary images, trademarks…even your personal Facebook pics:  http://www.tineye.com/

• Google Translate – Dont let a little Kanji get in the way of your reading a Japanese website: http://translate.google.com/# Give it the URL of a foreign language site and Google Translate will immediately translate it into the language of your choice.  It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

• Twazzup – If you want to get a pulse for what’s happening right now, use a real-time search engine like Twazzup: http://www.twazzup.com/.  You can follow conversations relating to your brand, competing products and services, and hot topics.

• More Google - Like it or not, Google is the king of data.  Google now offers realtime search results.  Google Trends is very interesting: http://www.google.com/trend . You can also use the advanced version called Google Insights: http://www.google.com/insights/search/# See what’s hot and what’s not.

• WHOIS – Sometime all you need to know is who owns a domain name.  For example, you may have the email address, and the email address is based on a domain name, so all you have to do is enter the domain name here: http://whois.domaintools.com/ Sometimes the info is ‘hidden’, but it’s worth a try anyway.

Of course, what’s fair for one is fair for all. You can use tools like the ones listed above to gather intelligence.  But others can do the same intel when interested in you.  What kind of data is your organization leaking into the wild?