He'd been searching the Net and couldn't find it. That sort of thing happens a lot more often than you might think. Human-source information is more interesting and more accurate than secondary information. That's why I spend a lot of my time tracking people. I also love conference proceedings.
Most companies send their best people to speak at conferences.
It's a great way to track talent and to track down people who might have useful information and insights. You can't reduce competitive intelligence to a spreadsheet. One exercise we like to do is to profile the top managers in a company or business unit. The more articles you collect, the more bios you download, the better you get at creating these profiles. All this material is on the Web.