At Home in the World

In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union fractured and collapsed, Kent Lee and Dima Frangulov forged ties with Soviet military officers, who gave them information regarding soon-to-be declassified government documents, including maps. “It was a massive declassification,” Lee says. “And it was material everyone wanted.”

East View was founded as a Russian-language information services company by Lee, CEO and president, and Frangulov, vice president, in 1989 after acquiring declassified material. Now, the Minneapolis firm provides customers with digital archives, maps, books, newspapers, journals, and government documents from Asian and Eastern European countries in addition to Russia. East View’s services are used in a number of ways: cartographers can update maps, historians access documents that were unavailable during the Cold War, and market researchers can analyze the Russia’s agriculture and labor statistics. The company also counts nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, media companies, and corporations among its customers.

“Russia was the first eight years or so of our company’s life,” Lee says. After this initial phase, the company expanded to include Asian and Eastern European materials, and two distinct divisions were formed: East View Information Services, and East View Cartographic, which provides data and images for topography, street mapping, and satellite photos.

Gathering Intelligence

The company’s new location quadrupled the amount of available office and archive space, setting the stage for more document acquisitions. Annual revenue for the privately held company is north of $10 million, Lee says, but that too is expected to grow. East View employs 120 people, many of which work in offices in Russia and Ukraine. Madagascar, Malawi, Nigeria, and Bangladesh have been targeted for more acquisitions. However, demand for Chinese information may grow to be East View’s golden goose as more businesses looking to enter that market need to track standards, legislation, and market data.

“In many respects, China is a more digitized country [than the United States]. An interesting thing is that they don’t necessarily design their [computer] networks to export the information to Western countries. That’s more of an afterthought,” Lee says.

But East View has succeeded in bridging the computer network and language gaps. It’s the exclusive North American distributor of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure database service. In May, the service released the Century Journals Project, a collection of publications representing more than 3,500 full-text Chinese journals from 1906 through 1993. This massive compilation links subscribers to newspapers, academic journals, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations from universities, and conference proceedings.