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Update: Hoover’s DB gave me a full refund.

Update: Customer support at Hoover’s DB contacted me and promised a full refund for this matter.

We are sorry that you were unhappy with the report you purchased from Hoover’s Inc. While we strive to maintain up to date and complete records, we occasionally find a company with fewer data points than others. Please know that I will be sending this for a full refund to our accounting office. Once they notify me, I will let you know via email. If any questions, please let me know.

Original post as below.

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Just don’t buy anything from Hoover’s DB.

I needed to know about IDEO’s financial information and found Hoover’s website and they provide paid financial report service. So I paid US$29 for it. After downloading the report, I found out it has all the necessary chapters and titles for the general financial report that we expect, but not *the data*. All the fields are blanks. I couldn’t believe my eyes. But it is true and see it for yourself.

Duh?

There is no new information on this page. I will explain why. Those revenues (2003~2005) are already on their web page. You can find it here. So you can easily calculate - if you really want to call this *calculate*-, the 1-year-sales-growth 18.8% by (82-69)/69.

I thought those blanks are filled in the paid report, since Hoover’s DB says the following:

The IDEO financial reports offered by Hoover’s provide more detail about IDEO’s financial performance than most information services. Financial reports are supplemented by business information that includes company executives, competitors, and operational insight into a potential customer, investment or competitor. Get access to business information for over 19 million companies, including research similar to IDEO financial reports.

Where is *more detail* about IDEO’s financial performance?

“than most information services”? << What does this mean?

Am I blind?

Agian, all the fields are blanks.

Here we go again.

The last page in the report, that I can’t reveal here, has two new numbers which I couldn’t find in 2 web pages for IDEO on Hoover’s DB. They are numbers of employee for 2003 and 2004. (the number for 2005 is on the main IDEO page, here) These two numbers may be worth US$29 for someone, but not for me and I don’t think it is for most of you.

So I decided to respond to their pretty-much-blank service.

Here’s the email that I sent to Hoover’s DB claiming a full refund.

I just downloaded the Hoover’s financial report on IDEO and found out that it has no financial information at all. All the field are just blanks.

 

I can’t understand how you charge me US$29 for this garbage? What is any new information provided on this paid report other than your web page for IDEO?

 

Unless you give me a full refund, I will write a blog about this to make other people realize the value of your report.

 

I hope this is just a mistake , where your quality assurance failed.

 

Please fix this to make your customer happy.

Buying digital contents should not be a gamble. Please someone at Hoover’s DB tells me what the value you provide for your custsomer and what I paid for.

Update: I just added information about Firebug, which I found while reading a book, “Ajax on Rails“.

Today I came across with an interesting guy, Joe Hewitt, while reading an article at TechCrunch. It was interesting since Joe, the co-founder of Parakey which is now merged by Facebook, alone developed the Facebook application for iPhone. An entrepreneur gave up his vision and became a developer of an iPhone application for Facebook??? Even though what Parakey was trying to do seems a bit vague on their website, it doesn’t seem like they didn’™t know what they were doing. Parakey was a developer of Firebug, a very popular Firefox plugin providing a wealth of web development tools and Joe made huge contribution in iPhone WebDev at Google Groups. Listen to his interview at the bottom of the article at TechCrunch. You will find that these whole things just didn’t make sense. So I digged more about him. Not long after, I found his blog and also found a kind of hint why he became an iPhone application developer in his blog.

Do you remember MS IE4 totally changed our internet life? It became de-facto standard in the old days, letting a lot of Netscape users crying out since there are abundant of IE4-only websites. (Include me among them. ;-)) So there were lots of people accusing MS of using non-standard technologies. The same debate is happening again with iPhone. Some people claim that iPhone will be like MS IE4 and it will create non-standard web sites which only work with iPhone so that other mobile device users will lose accessibility to those web site. Other people argue that there are so many innovations in iPhone and others should adopt them and let the industry figure out what will be the next standard as we go.

On the Compiler (”The IPhone Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again“):

Ironically, some of the best performing, easy-to-use sites on a mobile device are the very 1998-looking sites that just display content in a long list. Obviously, desktop users don’t want the web to revert to 1998, which is why designers find themselves caught in the middle and forced to design two separate sites - one mobile, one normal.

Which was working until the iPhone came along and created a 3rd space - iPhone-optimized sites.

The iPhone has created a division in the mobile-optimized web which is eerily similar to the days of IE 4 when many sites simply didn’t work in Netscape.

Joe said (“The IPhone Is IE4 Again (in a good way)”):

The iPhone is going to have the same effect as IE4, but unfortunately there are a fair amount of web developers who don’™t care about progress or innovation. The dogma of web standards has blinded them, to the point where they don’t even understand how standards come to be in the first place. Do you really expect companies to refrain from releasing new products until a standards body approves, and then for all their competitors to release an identical product at the same time?? Would you like to be held to that process in your work? Companies should be encouraged to release new things, and we should standardize later.

As for the iPhone’s side, there are still so many people who cry out for native iPhone SDK for better performance. But I think that the web service model gives much more value to people beyond the performance issue and believe that Apple will maintain their choice of web service model as the iPhone development platform. I know that it’s Apple’s call to make. Until now, the answer was “NO”. Let’s see if Apple will open the Pandora’s box. Now back to Joe Hewitt, I think Joe is seeing something in iPhone, which might be different with what I am seeing but I am sure that he will agree this:

iPhone is setting the new standard in mobile web.

At slideshare.net you can synchronize your powerpoint with your own audio file so that you can slidecast your presentation. And it’s absolutely free!! Powerpoint version of YouTube. This is a test done by a presentation guru, Garr Reynolds.

Sometimes we need more than podcast. With slideshare.net we can add presentation sides to a podcast. I think I can easily create tutorials for a new service or lectures using this service. Creating a flash tutorial was too much and too difficult for me.

I love the world when everything gets easy!

Update: There is Zentation, where you can easily sync your slides with *video*. Here’s a very good example done by Guy Kawasaki. I highly recommend to watch his keynote, “The Art of Innovation” at the 2007 Event Marketer Conference.

Wonder who are the fathers of Powerpoint? The answer is Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin. A recent article of Wall Street Journal covers their story, which is quite interesting.