Barry Porter Managing General Partner Clarity Partners
Zagat.com
I travel frequently and this site provides great restaurant recommendations in the United States and now in select international cities. They have London, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto and Vancouver. It’s a nice simple site, you log on and pick the city, the cuisine or the d & #233;cor. Let’s say I’m traveling to London on business and I want to find the best Asian restaurant. I pop on the site, hit London, enter the cuisine and out pops Nobu on Hyde Park Corner.
Aap.org
This is the American Academy of Pediatrics site. Whenever you get nervous about something, you call pull up a wealth of unbiased and reliable information 24 hours a day. If you wake up and your child has a problem in the middle of the night, you can usually put your fears to rest by logging on to this site. And usually it will make you realize that your fears are overblown. For instance, if your child wakes up and has a rash, you enter the symptoms in the search engine and it comes back with a series of news releases telling you what most likely the problem is.
Cnn.com
I use this site everyday. It’s easy to click from politics to financials to Sports Illustrated. It certainly makes it a lot easier to have all this information on one site.
Venturewire.net
This site provides the latest news in private equity and venture capital. This is sort of the Daily Variety or Hollywood Reporter of our industry. We’re most interested in what’s happening in communications investments in different places in the developed world, whether it’s the United States, Europe or Asia. It’s a great window into which technologies will be deployed next in the United States.
Multex.com
This is the best one-stop shopping site for company and industry research. Basically, what they do is they aggregate information from most of the major brokerage firms all in one easy-to-navigate place. If we’re considering an investment in a particular industry or looking at a public company as a good data point, I enter the company name or industry. Multex will retrieve research reports from Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston pretty much every major brokerage firm. And it gives you the headline of the research report, the size and who put it out.
The order in which the sites are listed does not necessarily reflect the subject’s preferences or frequency of use.
