Disclosure: Webby’s World is getting paid to write this review. We will try not to let this alter our opinion

iBegin Source is a site which provides access to databases of information regarding businesses in the United States. They offer this service free-of-charge for non-commercial use and for commercial use they charge between $1,000 and $40,000, depending on how many states you want data on.

Whilst this may sound hefty, all businesses are geocoded (in KML) and would therefore be useful for a company like Google to include on their maps service. All of iBegin supports popular standards such as the hcard microformat as well as valid XHTML and CSS.

iBegin Source also takes a wiki approach; this is good as it allows it to be easily and quickly updated and maintained. Of course, it also makes it prone to abuse. But that is the risk of any wiki system; iBegin would not be able to provide their prices if it was a conventional Yellow Pages service.

Currently, iBegin Source lists 10,820,497 businesses. I think this is a fairly realistic estimate for the total amount of businesses in the United States as the population of that grand nation is 300,000,000 . It’s a shame that at the moment only United States businesses are listed because sites such as Google (or GPS software like TomTom) don’t have good listings for the UK and a service like this would be useful for them.

The site also has a nice, light design which is hard to find in today’s B2B websites. It has a lot of whitespace therefore it doesn’t strain your eyes.

iBegin Source is an interesting service. Whilst it might be a bit out of my price range, it would be useful for businesses who had a need for such services.

Tags: b2b, ibegin, ibegin source, web2.0, web2, web 2, web 2.0