‘After a decade of work as a statistician in government and an economist in industry, Samuel Wolpert founded a small company in Cleveland, Ohio, to publish a collection of product forecasts based on the SIC code. ..The journal was intentioned as quarterly and to appeal to market researchers. ..In the first three years, annual revenue was under $50,000, but by 1970, sales had reached the $1 million mark. By the end of the 1970s, Predicasts had 25 publications, 120 employees, $4.5 million in revenue, and $0.7 million in pretax profits’.^[2] In 1982 Indian Head (the U.S. subsidiary of Thyssen-Bornemisza N.V. of the Netherlands.) purchased Predicasts, later reselling it to Information Access. When the Indian Head/Thyssen conglomerate purchased Predicasts this was a significant purchase.^[3]

In the early 1970’s businesses could access this information from their own computer terminals through Predicasts own PTS system which, at the time, was one of the largest online business information systems in the world. ^[4]

One Predicast product, PROMT (Predicasts Overview of Markets and Technology) is still available online and covers companies, the products and technologies they produce, and the markets in which they compete.

Appendix(^[2],^[6]):

“(in describing pioneers ) We must add Sam Wolpert, who developed the innovative Predicasts database. One time he said that every event in the world can be classified according to geography, product type, transaction type, and time. He set up his indexing schema along those lines. This was our first business database. It focused on chemistry and electronics and was subscribed to in hard copy form by most of SDC's chemical customers.

We beat SDC to full-text title and abstract indexing and this was one of the reasons. Predicasts gave us an exclusive for a time...”

"It still pays to hedge one's prophecies somewhat, says Fern Pomerantz, a vice president of Predicasts, Inc., of Cleveland, which does about the broadest line of business prophesying in America today...Since Predicasts' just released annual volume of forecasts contains 50,000 long- and short-term preductions, a little hedging may be wise.

Ms. Pomerantz said Predicasts' record for calling the shots well ahead of time in the business world has been 'as good or better than that of the econometric forecasters who build computer models.' Predicasts uses the computer but doesn't build models. She said inflation and high interest rates have played havoc with some of the company's dollar volume forecasts but 'unit volume predictions have been quite successful.'^[6]

References