Sept. 28, 1999
Contact: Nick Patterson
205-975-8858/[email protected]
A University of Alabama at Birmingham economist has created an Internet tool that provides quick economic forecasting from wide-ranging data to students and clients around the world.
Economagic, L.L.C. is a new web-based business that automatically gathers and manipulates minutely detailed statistics from myriad government agencies in the United States, Canada, and Japan, as well as trade associations and private companies. The numbers, in more than 100,000 data files, can be displayed as plain numerals, charts, or spreadsheets, compared, contrasted, and downloaded.
Ted Bos, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, originally designed Economagic.com to give his students easy access to economic information, but now that classroom tool has become the backbone of a for-profit venture. Bos and UAB economist Hank McCarl, Ph.D., are partners in Economagic (www.economagic.com), which in April became a new business located in UAB's high tech incubator, the Office for the Advancement of Developing Industries, or OADI.
People use Economagic to chart how information changes over time, or predict based on that, how it will change in the future. This helps academics do research, businesses compare markets for expansion, and non-profits determine the best time to mount capital campaigns. Want to know how many people are out of work in Anniston, Ala., and how that differs from Boise, Ida.? The number of building permits issued in Honolulu this year? The value of all the irrigated cropland in Texas' 11th District? That's the kind of information available on Economagic.com, which currently logs more than 20,000 hits a week.
Bos described the site as "a one-stop shop supermarket" for economic data. "The goal is that Economagic will become the first site that people think about when they want to do some economic research requiring historical data," Bos said. "So far, visitors to the site have been mostly from universities -- professors and students, U.S. and international -- and from financial institutions including banks, insurance companies, brokers, and mutual fund companies."
The statistical data on the Economagic page is free, with a paid subscription being required for some services. In the near future, the site will charge a fee for forecasting, generating spreadsheet files that automatically update themselves, and managing economic databases.
Economagic is a tenant company in the new 67,000-square-foot OADI Technology Center, the first building in the 100-acre UAB Research Park at Oxmoor Valley in southwest Birmingham. The center will eventually house 25 buildings of office and laboratory space for use by high-tech R&D companies. Tenants include advanced biotechnology, biomedical, computer and pharmaceutical entrepreneurs.
For more information, call Bos at 205-934-8830.
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