Market Intelligence

Market intelligence is the information relevant to a company's markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining strategy in areas such as market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development.

If you're a web developer, your market is the sea of domains out there. Actually, it's the domain owners. But oftentimes you may be looking from the 'outside in' and you're trying to find out more about the domain to determine if the owner would be a prospective customer. When trying to find out more about a website, there are several sources to turn to. Market intelligence about a website can be made easier by the large SEO market. In other words, there are SEO tools that help you gain market intelligence about somebody else's website.

Alexa

Amazon's alexa service can tell you about a website http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/freephile.org

SEMRush

Search Engine Marketing Rush http://www.semrush.com/info/freephile.org

Website Informer

The website informer website can potentially be very helpful in addition to raw whois in finding out who the heck somebody is when we know next to nothing about them except an email or domain.

When you lookup an email address at website.informer.com, you might get a whole lot of information such as the other domains connected with this address, and also other email addresses connected to the email address.

It lists the persons

NAME
COMPANY
ADDRESS
PHONE NUMBER

EasyCounter

http://www.easycounter.com/report/pcwiki.peacecorpsconnect.org

BuildVisit

http://domain.buildvisit.com/ The data can be stale, so watch out for that. But, still useful for a quick look at many aspects of a site.

Sales / Accounting / Risk Management

While developing your presence in the market, you also need to be able to check company financial and personal backgrounds for the people you are doing business with. In the old days, you could only go to wp:Dun & Bradstreet for credit history etc. D&B own Hoovers which is kinda the same thing. They trademarked the term "Company 360" and turned it into an Australian Company (http://company360.com.au/)

wp:AllBusiness.com was in the same business, but focused on aggregating data on small (<500 people) companies. Survivor of the Internet bubble, and later acquired by D&B, it was shut down and revived again. The current website http://www.allbusiness.com offers many things including forms and agreements

Take all this data with a high degree of skepticism correlating with how expensive it is to access. On the other hand, completely free information is sometimes the best/most accurate

More Business Directories and Databases

wp:TechCrunch (owned by AOL) is a company that offers the CrunchBase website where you can find corporate backgrounder plus info on venture capital and executive team. todo I should create a profile
http://www.inbusiness.com/ (part of E-PersonalFinance.com and allbusiness.com)
There are many wp:Financial data vendors such as Bloomberg Terminal, Thompson Reuters, Moody's, Morningstar. Some you might access online or in your local library, others might only be found in a brokerage house since the cost of these services can be several thousands of dollars per user per year.
Zoominfo is a company that offers profiles, and has a "community edition" that they'll provide in exchange for your business contacts (NO THANKS). Although they don't let you easily search their database for free (they make it very hard to find), you can Google search for "John Doe" Zoominfo and get at least teaser results. Overall, it's a mechanical service that falls flat. They list 5 different people if you search for "Greg Rundlett"... they're all me. On the other hand, if you look at the LinkedIn profile for Greg Rundlett you get the whole me in one place. I had to create an account, login, and claim/merge my identities.
Intellius is a company that is more oriented towards employee screening, identity protection and background checks. Again, the data that they mechanically assemble is of questionable quality. For example, they list me as living in York, ME. I have never lived in York, ME. All my residence info is public, so it's pathetic that they have false information that has "survived" for 20 years. They offer a way to get someone's email address if you provide the name and location. Despite my posting for 20+ years on public message boards and hundreds of websites, they have some .net address for me. I don't have a .net email address (at least not one that I use). And Google reveals my email address(es) in milliseconds for free.

See also: Deadpool where tech flops go for a swim.