What is Garmin?-Free Investment Analysis

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Garmin, Ltd. is an industry leader in the navigation, communications, and information device market. Garmin breaks down its corporate structure by the industries for which it makes devices, namely aviation, automotive/mobile, marine, and outdoor/fitness. Garmin’s aviation division, which is the company’s most mature market, makes devices that incorporate all necessary flight information; such as navigation, autopilot, terrain avoidance, communication, and engine sensor data onto one small panel. The automotive/mobile division is Garmin’s highest volume market, with revenues doubling from 2006 to 2007. The main products for this market are Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) that customers install on car dashboards. The marine division produces chartplotter,...click here to read the rest.

What is China Telecom?-Free Investment Analysis

China Telecom is a large state owned telecom enterprise which provides various telecommunication services in China. The company operates a variety of domestic and international fixed line networks, provides telecom network-based data transmission services, and carries out account settlements for international telecom services. Its customer base includes governments, residential clients and business consumers. The company is headquartered in Beijing, China and has more than a quarter million employees.

China Telecom was formerly a complete monopoly but its assets in 10 northern provinces of China were transferred to a rival telecom company, China Netcom, in 2002, leaving China Telecom with 21 provinces. Even though the...click here to read the rest.

What is Boeing?-FREE Investment Analysis

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William E. Boeing formed Pacific Aero Products Co. in Seattle, Washington, in 1916. In 1934, because of the Air Mail Act, which prohibited airlines and manufacturers from being under the same corporate umbrella, the company split into Boeing, United Airlines, and United Aircraft Corporation (today known as United Technologies). Boeing started out manufacturing planes for the military during World War I and then began participating in mail delivery. They also entered the passenger plane market when it became popular. Within ten years, Boeing was one of the largest aircraft manufacturers in the country.

Boeing designs and manufactures rotorcraft, electronic and defense systems, missiles, satellites, launch vehicles, and advanced information and communication systems. Boeing...click here to read the rest.

What is 3M?-FREE Investment Analysis

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3M is a diversified technology company that has a presence in a number of fields, including industrial and transportation, healthcare, display and graphics, consumer and office, safety, security and protection services, and electro and communications. The company was founded in 1902, in Two Harbors, Minnesota, as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. The original five founders established the company to mine mineral deposits used as grinding-wheel abrasives. Over time, 3M developed into a heavy research and science based corporation. Just a few of their innovations include the world’s first water-proof sandpaper, masking tape (which launched the Scotch© brand name), and the now world-famous Post-It Notes ©. Beyond its more famous brands, 3M makes everything from reflective adhesive for highway signs to optical films for LCD televisions.

Today, 3M is divided into six different business ventures, which are: Consumer & Office, Display & Graphics, Electoro & Communications, Health Care, Industrial & Transportation, and Safety, Security, & Protection Services. These six businesses...click here to read the rest.

What is Infosys?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Infosys, formed in July 2, 1981 by Narayana Murthy and six other members: Nandan Nilekani, N. S. Raghavan, Kris Gopalakrishnan (current CEO), S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora. By mortgaging the jewelry of Murthy’s wife for Rs. 10,000 their vision turned into a reality. Since 1981, it has grown to be a Fortune 500 company and is the first Indian company to make the NASDAQ 100 (largest non-financial companies in the NASDAQ stock change).

Infosys Technologies is an IT services and consulting firm based in Bangalore, India with offices around the globe. Its offerings spans business and technology consulting, application services, systems integration, product engineering, custom software development, maintenance, re-engineering, independent testing...click here to read the rest.

What is Akamai?-Free Investment Analysis

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Akamai Technologies, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides technology solutions for advanced content and application delivery over the internet. The company was formed in 1998 by MIT graduate Daniel Lewis with the help of Tom Leighton, Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan.

The company provides services to businesses, government agencies and other enterprises to help them perform effectively in their online businesses. Akamai has created an operating environment on the web which allows their client’s web pages to manage demands...click here to read the rest.

What is Zara?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Amancia Ortega founded Zara, a flagship clothing company of Inditex Group, in 1975. Zara is headquartered in A Coruña, Spain and is the world’s second largest clothing retailer. The first Zara featured low priced imitations of popular fashions which proved very successful and gave birth to the Zara of today.

Ortega started the business forty-four years ago with the help of his wife by making lingerie and gowns in his living room. Since then, it has grown to a company with...click here to read the rest.

What is GameFly?-FREE Investment Analysis

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GameFly was born when avid gamers Sean Spector and Jung Suh (founders) felt that renting a game at a video store provided a very limited library and not enough time to judge the game without spending too much on fees. To solve this problem they created their own videogame rental company following the business model set forth by Netflix. This business now dominates the online video game rental industry. They have easily succeeded in their goals to recreate the videogame rental service.

GameFly, just like Netflix, sends games to subscribers via the postal service with pre-paid return shipping. The gamers can keep the game...click here to read the rest.

What is LegalZoom?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Legalzoom, the national leader in producing online legal documents, has been able to utilize impressive growth largely due to the way it uses technology to alter aspects of the clunky, time consuming, and expensive legal system in place today. Today the company has over 60 employees and over 5 million dollars in revenue and has enormous potential to continue to expand in a very profitable market.

Brian Lee, the co-founder and chairman of LegalZoom.com came up with the idea after realizing the everyday need for legal services was coupled with the inability for many to pay the high hourly cost of an experienced attorney. Legal zoom, a private company, came to be held by employees and the people who helped fund it because of obstacles that arose in financing the business in its early stages. The idea and...click here to read the rest.

What is Pfizer?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Pfizer is the largest research-based biological company in the world, with its headquarters in New York and its Research and Development (R&D) Center in Groton, Connecticut. In 1849, Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhardt founded Pfizer in Brooklyn; their first product was an anti-parasitic drug, santonin. This drug was an immediate success and by 1910 the company was the leading fermentation expert. This specific skill was used to mass produce penicillin, the “miracle drug” during World War II; the majority of the penicillin shipped oversees was produced by Pfizer.

Today, Pfizer is run by ...Click here to read the rest.

What is Visa?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Visa Incorporated is an international corporation based out off San Francisco, California. It is the largest operator of electronic retail payment, managing payments among financial institutions, merchants, consumers businesses, and government entities around the world. Before becoming public in early 2008 it was operated as a cooperative of 21,000 financial institutions. Visa now issues three types of cards: Debit cards (pay from a checking / savings account), Credit cards (pay monthly payments with interest), and Prepaid cards (pay from a cash account that has no check writing privileges).

The birth of Visa is very interesting. Bank of America originally launched a BankAmericard credit card in 1958 which eventually became international through partnerships with other banks. Soon, it grew so big that BankAmericard was given up by Bank of America and formed its own corporation by the name of NBI. This corporation managed the BankAmericard system within the United States, although Bank of America continued to develop the...click here to read the rest.

What is Hulu?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Hulu is a joint venture firm founded between News Corporation and NBC Universal in March of 2008. Hulu’s underlying philosophy is “Old is Gold” because revenues are made by showing complete episodes of well-known television series. In addition, full-length movies, highly demanded clips from primetime television shows, news stories, and sports games are also offered. These videos are presented on a clean and professional, user-friendly interface. The start-up company, led by CEO Jason Kilar, tries to leverage its competitors such as iTunes and YouTube with a more user friendly interface that is responsive to its target audience. For users, the service is free and ad-supported, with optional registration. In addition to NBC and Fox, Hulu also carries shows from USA Network, Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci-Fi, Style, Sundance, G4, and Oxygen channels.

Even though Hulu is a service available to anyone, it is geared towards the Generation Y demographic. Generation Y is the 79.8 million person generation, also known as the Millennial, comprising mainly of individuals in their twenties, born between 1977 and 1995. This generation is technologically literate, highly individualistic...Click Here to read the rest.

What is General Electric?-FREE Investment Analysis

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General Electric, more commonly known as GE, is a multinational conglomerate that focuses on technology, media, and financial services. GE began in 1876 with Thomas Alva Edison’s opening of his first experimental factory in New Jersey. After a number of years of experimenting, he established the Edison General Electric Company in 1890. For two years, Edison’s General Electric was in stiff competition with Thomson-Houston Company, a rival electrical innovation company. In 1892, after each company’s patents began to make it impossible to install new technology, the two companies combined to form the General Electric Company.

Since that time, GE has gone through countless acquisitions and restructures to become the incredibly diversified company that it is today. GE is now divided into four separate businesses that focus on individual industries, and while these businesses are separate, they still complement each other. Those divisions are Technology Infrastructure, Energy Infrastructure, GE Capital, and NBC Universal. These four divisions employ...Click Here to read the rest.

What is TATA Motors?-FREE Investment Analysis

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Tata Motors is a multinational corporation with headquarters in Mumbai, India, led by Ratan Tata, the Chairman. It was founded by Jameshetji Tata and J. Baker when Mercedes-Benz and Tata Motors joined forces to produce the first truck in India. Tata Motors is India’s leading manufacturer of passenger and commercial vehicles. On the global scale, it is the fifth largest medium and heavy commercial vehicle manufacturer and the second largest medium and heavy bus manufacturer. Over 4 million Tata vehicles are on Indian roads today, with the first one manufactured back in 1954. Tata Motors is just one branch of the Tata Group. Tata Motors has manufacturing bases spread all across the country and customers have over 2,000 touch points when dealerships, sales, and service centers are taken into account. It was the first Indian company from the engineering sector to be listed on the NYSE in 2004, and by 2005 it was ranked a top 10 company in India with revenues close to $7.2 Billion. Recently it has had many new economically conservative cars, ....Click Here to read the rest.

KnowTheCo has launched

Hey guys!
Just wanted you guys to know that KnowTheCo.com has finally launched. There are 11 articles up, but we plan on having 1 new company up each week. For those of you who do not know:

KnowTheCo is a website whose purpose is to analyze companies in such a way that the average individual is educated about the qualitative aspects of a firm and its business model. These free analyses are designed to help investors and curious individuals alike begin the research processes necessary to make intelligent investment decisions for the both the long and short term. This is achieved through careful and in depth research of each company, summarized in articles, to revel the following core aspects: current strengths and competitive advantages, future opportunities, threats, and weaknesses.


These are the following links guys for the articles:
TATA Motors: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=22
GE: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=27
Hulu: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=26
Visa: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=21
Pfizer: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=23
LegalZoom: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=31
GameFly: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=28
Zara: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=20
Infosys: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=25
3M: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=30
Boeing: http://knowtheco.com/index.php?news=29