a world without waffle.(Euromonitor International Inc.)

Byline: Bobby Pickering

Euromonitor has just released an online country intelligence database, fashioning another weapon for the arsenal in its battle against the market goliaths -- Global Insight and EIU. A nicely designed service, Country Insight will appeal to a wider base of users.

For a start, Euromonitor isn't pitching it as a high-end system with full-powered news alerts and risk analysis. Country Insight is a more generalist service for researchers and business development staff who want simple, non-jargon overviews of the key economic, political, social and demographic trends that affect markets in specific countries or regions.

Euromonitor says it isn't aimed at high-level analysts. "Country Insight will enable non-experts to analyse markets and understand their dynamics, helping them make sense of underlying socio-economic trends," says the company.

"Competitor databases are not big on things like social trends, poverty, income and environmental data," says business development manager Chris Burke. "As our main focus is companies researching in the fast-moving consumer goods area, we'll have data and reports they'll find highly useful."

Country Insight has a fairly solid dataset, giving full coverage for 70-plus countries, although some continents fare better than others. Euromonitor says it plans to expand coverage dramatically over the next year, but it will have its work cut out to match EIU's database of 200-plus countries, or the similar breadth of geographic datasets from Global Insight -- the name Country Insight is, surely, a little dig at an arch-rival.

On logging into the system, you find a clearly set-out navigational menu down the left-hand side of the home page, some recently added or updated headline reports, and some browsable articles to the right.