Hot Cities

Places Rated Almanac (Macmillan General Reference) by David Savageau and Geoffrey Loftus. Facts on labor markets, cost of living, housing, education, crime, health care and climate for more than 350 metropolitan areas in North America.

Statistical Abstract of the United States 1998 (U. S. Department of Commerce). More than 1,000 pages of graphs, tables and other statistics describing the United States in myriad ways. Available in book or CD-ROM format from Superintendent of Documents, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250.

STAT-USA (www.stat-usa.gov). A vast online information service with economic, business, social and environmental data generated by scores of federal sources.

About Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), with the world's largest information database, tracks 49 million companies worldwide--11 million in the United States alone. Businesses use D&B's services to find new customers and evaluate their creditworthiness, identify potential suppliers, and collect overdue receivables.

Through face-to-face and telephone interviews and public-records searches, more than 200 million financial transactions are added annually to D&B's files in the United States alone. D&B updates its information base continually--an average of 950,000 times each business day.

When businesses are entered in the D&B database, they are issued D-U-N-S numbers (similar to Social Security numbers). The U.S. federal government requires companies to have this number to bid for government contracts. Also used by the United Nations and the European Union, the D&B D-U-N-S number is quickly becoming the universal standard for identifying businesses on the Web as well.

For more information about D&B, call (800) 234-3867 or visit the D&B Web site at www.dnb.com. To register for a D-U-N-S number, call (800) 333-0505.

This article was originally published in the October 1999 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Hot Cities.