The Agreement was signed by Mr. Dominique Marolleau, Director General of Infogreffe and Mr. Ben Cronin, Chief Executive Officer of Global Business Register Ltd.

Stay tuned there is more good news to come in the next few weeks.

Many thanks for your comments and feedback.

Regarding “We are essentially dealing with government departments in all the countries we connect to and in some cases (not all I might add) the realisation that Internet customers want access 24×7×365 has not sunk in yet” I think most of us have had experience of this. I see that the Companies House Webcheck service is now available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but I recall being let down in the past by their ‘opening hours’ in the early hours of the morning when I desperately needed company info before getting the 6 a.m. train to Manchester!

The index allowing a search across jurisdictions will be very useful, even if it can only identify the countries in which a company is registered. For example, I may have contact details for a company that suggests its main activities are in Denmark but it may in fact also be active and registered in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. An index would be alert me to alternative registrations that I might need to check. I would not mind having to run separate searches on those countries’ registries; what is important to me is that I am made aware of those other registrations.

Do keep us updated on developments. If comments to this posting are closed (as they are after 90 days of the date of the original posting) then please do email me.

Firstly, many thanks for your detailed write-up. We find the feedback we get from valued contributors like yourself immensely valuable when it comes to improving the service we offer. We are very grateful for it.

Secondly, I acknowledge that there are some issues that appear to be reliability related. The service is new and we are working through these issues as fast as we can. Some are technical, some relate to things such as opening hours, some to description of documents across jurisdictions as they are not standard in many cases. We are essentially dealing with government departments in all the countries we connect to and in some cases (not all I might add) the realisation that Internet customers want access 24x7x365 has not sunk in yet.

We operate an email support service and if anyone who is trying to use the service is having difficulties they are free to contact us at support@gbrdirect.co.uk and we will respond as quickly as we can – usually minutes during business hours. Support is limited to English only currently.

You referred to the successful search fee. We do not charge any administration, registration or annual maintenance charges. We allow free searching up to the point where the customer decides he has received value i.e. they have found the company they are looking for. The small search fee is primarily to allow for the provision of support and maintenance of our service. To date, our users have understood that to provide a good service costs money. We hope that our assessment of this is correct. If we have, we will certainly look at it.

In the first half of 2010 we hope to add multilanguage support to the site so users in Europe will be able to search in their own languages. We will be adding an index of all companies in all countries (24 million of them!) connected to the network that will allow for searching across jurisdictions. This will allow, initially, to find a company in a particular country connected to the network. The next step will need to be performed, as it is currently, where you search for the identified company in the country on their Live national register database. But hopefully this will eliminate the need to manually search multiple countries before you find the company you are looking for.

Thanks again for the feedback and if any of your readers have any difficulties navigating or using the site they should not hesitate to contact us for support as we will help them.