"Consumer electronics is a notoriously cutthroat business, and the advent of LCD and Plasma televisions has made it even worse. We make multi-million dollar product bets all the time, and often we do this without a good idea of what the competitors are doing or what the market wants. Everyone has MBA textbooks on their shelves, but who has time to look at them.

As a CI professional, I wish I could deliver perfect, timely nuggets of information along with market share data and analysis. But that requires sifting through a mountain of information such as competitor websites, news sources, patent filings, interviews, regulatory filings and business deals.

I want to see the early warning signals that my competitor is shifting away from LCDs, moving manufacturing to Mexico, increasing distribution through big-box retail, or struggling to hit quarterly sales targets. But gathering and making sense of this diversity of market information is too time-consuming — it always slips through the cracks."