Dow Jones’ Factiva, one of the largest digital business information aggregators and archivers in the world, sees a growing interest among Korean companies for its services, which can start at about $2,500 a month.

Korea business development manager Kim Sae-hoon said, “Corporations are hungry for reasonable and accurate information. So Korea, even if the information industry is not there yet, we expect it will grow, the media industry is booming here but it’s in the beginning stages.”

The average knowledge worker spends about 25 percent of the day searching for needed information and out of that, the annual economic loss due to information overload at work is $900 billion, according to Basex, an IT research and consulting firm.

“Google is not free, it might not cost you anything but in terms of lost cost opportunities, wasted time, its actually very expensive,” said Factiva regional sale director Christian Marsden during a recent visit.

Factiva monitors and searches through 31,000 sources from 200 countries in 26 languages, thousands of which are not accessible via common search engines.

Dow Jones Factiva is hoping to make giant inroads into Korea by servicing international conglomerates and firms.

“There is a lot of interest, especially with companies that have an international scale,” he said.

(yoav@heraldcorp.com)