Hubs: Hubs Data

List of Variables

For a more in-depth of the variables and procedure please see: Hubs: Mechanical Turk. This page will reflect the variables being collected separated into three categories. Each variable will include a breakdown of levels being collected if the definition is not trivial and an approximate approach.

As of Week of 7/25

Group 1

Variables Difficult to Obtain

1. Founding Date
   • Difficulty: Finding date based on our strategies
   • New Approach: 1) Whois.net Date, 2) Factavia/other press release searches
2. Multiple locations within city + Franchise (as of now just addresses)
   • Difficulty: Company or establishment level will impact measurements
   • New Approach: Will record all addresses at company level
3. Onsite Venture Capital v. Angel Investors (e.g. # and Assets Under Management)
   • Levels: Binary, list of investors
   • Difficulty: Hub website usually does not include investors
   • New Approach: 1) google key terms with address of Hub, 2) start with partners and use google/crunchbase

Group 2

Variables Comfortable, Not Complete

1. Onsite Mentors
2. Office hours investors
3. Office hours mentor/advisors
4. Sponsors/Partners
   • University
   • Corporate
5. Community membership?
6. Onsite temporary workshops and Networking Meetups (Count)
   • Levels:
7. Curriculum
8. Onsite code school
9. Alumni Network
10. Size (sqft)
11. Size (# companies)
12. Onsite accelerator

Group 3

Variables Easy to Obtain

1. Twitter activity
   • Levels: Twitter Handle, # Tweets in a Month, # Followers, # Retweets
   • Approach: Easy to get twitter handle from Turk or Veeral's code that allows us to run a series of searches on google and then use Gunny's Twitter crawler to get other levels from handle
2. Site URL
   • Level: URL
   • Approach: Google using Veeral's code that allows us to search
3. Address
   • Level: Will include all addresses
   • Approach: Google key terms (e.g. Contact Us) and URL using Veeral's code
4. Nonprofit status
   • Level: Binary variable indicating if the potential Hub is a nonprofit organization
   • Approach: http://www.guidestar.org/ is a site that we can use to search if a company is nonprofit or not
5. Mission statement
   • Level: Official mission statement or description of company (if mission does not exist)
   • Approach: If not explicitly stated mission statement, will include "About" or statements on main page
6. Specific Industry
   • Level: Industry included in statement (no aggregation)
   • Approach: *Based on Mission Statement, not aggregated
7. Price for a space/office
   • Level: Two prices one for shared, other for private
   • Approach: Uses google methodology with key terms and URL