ZoomProspector Helps Decide Where a Business Will Perform Best

Today we are witnessing launch of ZoomProspector, a very interesting and promising startup targeted at enterprise customers. The idea behind the service is to help companies survive the current economic turmoil by providing them with vital information that can either make or break their businesses. In particular, the focus of the startup is where a business should be located to achieve maximum performance efficiency.

So whenever a company is looking to start, expand or relocate a business, ZoomProspector is here to provide information on the community in this or that place to help make a thoughtful decision and just the right choice.

ZoomProspector works by aggregating various demographic, social and economic data along with information on commercial real estate. All the aspects are bundled together to provide a user with a comprehensive and meaningful dataset that will help the company make the decision on the right place to run the business. The results take into account both the workforce available in the area and the potential customers as well as various infrastructure factors that can be vital for a business to make a decision on the location.

When a business registers with ZoomProspector, the owner starts by choosing the parameters that he views as favorable for his business and searching the information available on the site to see which communities will be the best fit. It is possible to choose if you want to select between cities and counties, choose the educational background required, availability of venture capital, job growth rates, and various other parameters.

ZoomProspector also has a database of commercial real estate so it is possible to perform a complex search here - with all the parameters like the type of the property you are looking for combined with all the demographic and social background required for your business to perform best.

The business model is not particularly clear for now but I have my guess anyway. All the search operations on the site are free for businesses without any limitations. But of course there may be situations when a business is not completely satisfied with the results and is willing to drill down deeper to make sure the decision is 100% correct. For that ZoomProspector has a database of experts - to help both with site selection and economic development. A business can search for the experts on the site and contact those they could be interested in working with. The site does not serve as a marketplace that connects businesses with such experts and charge commission but I believe such experts will have to pay either for their membership or for some additional visibility of their services throughout the service - and this sounds like a reasonable potential source of revenue.

The service is only available for the US only, of course, but I do hope to see either ZoomProspector expanding to other countries where the required information is available for aggregation or some local competitors launching as this is a service that actually solves a serious problem for businesses.

It is absolutely understandable that when the general financial climate is far from healthy (as it obviously now is), companies simply can not afford making wrong decisions and learning on their own mistakes and correcting them later. Every mistake means new investments - and this is what companies try to avoid whenever possible, most of all when they simply don’t have extra funds to fund such mistakes and correcting actions.

So we obviously see a startup working exactly how Tim O’Reilly suggested all of us do: trying to build something useful instead of creating yet another funny application that makes no real-life sense and is distracting more than anything else. ZoomProspector obviously has very solid real-life value for enterprise customers and is supposed to be able to develop into a healthy startup itself if they bring enough companies to the service to make sure their experts will want to pay for visibility on the site.