In all, it took most of a full week to write the program, run it many times, and gather as complete a database of actual organizations as possible.

Once the organization list was retrieved, we had to determine the number of individual users per organization, sort out the organizations, and segment them into industries. There is no easy cross-reference list between organizations and their industry. As a result, we had to sift, by hand, thousands and thousands of raw database entries, looking at a company name, and assigning an appropriate industry, all the while looking for any trends that popped out.

From that effort, we were able to identify a set of companies that had more than ten readers each and then look at what industries those companies were part of. The results were, to say the least, nothing short of fascinating.

Readership overview
We have an amazingly diverse readership with a phenomenal sphere of influence. It ranges from the Department of Justice, the Federal Reserve, and the Pentagon's Air Force Command all the way to power-influencers like McKinsey & Company and real, hard-core industrial firms like Enron and Schlumberger. Along the way, we reach healthcare firms, insurance companies, media outlets, distributors, automakers, and a whole lot of financial firms.

Here's how some of that breaks out. First, as I told you at the beginning, about 17% of our readers are outside the United States. In order of the percentage of readership, the top twenty countries reading PalmPower's Enterprise Edition are the U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Singapore, Brazil, Japan, Denmark, Italy, Malaysia, Taiwan, Mexico, Switzerland, Norway, Belgium, and Israel.

Of the traceable IP addresses we were able to attribute to PalmPower Enterprise Edition readers, 24% were accessing the journal through ISPs (Internet Service Providers) such as AOL, CompuServe, and EarthLink. As mentioned above, 17% were from outside the United States. 10% were readers who had unique IP addresses but could not be traced to any specific organization.

In our analysis project, we really wanted to find out those organizations with large blocks of readers. So we divided the remaining 49% into two groups: those where we found less than 10 readers per organization and those where we could trace ten or more readers to an organization. You can see how all this comes together in the pie chart shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


We were able to determine that at least 21% of our readers were at companies with more than 10 readers. Roll over picture for a larger image.

It's that last 21% that we broke into industry groups and identified some of the companies and organizations reading the magazine. Let's look at some of those groups:

Government
We have a lot of readers both in the U.S. Government and various foreign governments. International governments include the Australian government, the United Kingdom government, the Canadian government, the Singapore government, the Hong Kong government, and the Brazilian government. There's even a block of readers at the United Nations. Inside the U.S., there are readers at the US Department of Justice, various National Labs, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Federal Reserve, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the DOE (Department of Energy), the GSA (General Services Administration), the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture), the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), as well as within many state governments.