Wondering how to get in touch with a particular company, or who runs it? Or maybe you're just curious about the companies you interact with every day?

Knowledge is power, and today Cool Websites and Apps is outlining five sites with information about almost any company. Whether you want to complain or are just doing some research, there's a lot of information out there if you know where to look for things like board members, phone numbers, and other ways to find out more about Internet companies and more. Let's dive in.

FindTheCompany: Get a Quick Summary of Any Company

Have you ever wondered how big a chain your local grocery store might be? Or where the headquarters of AT&T are? How many people work for Google? FindTheCompany is a site that gives you a quick overview of these and other facts, along with profiles of the people who own and run these companies.

Whether you're considering working for a particular company, or just find yourself curious because the Internet, this is a great site to quickly find key bits of information about almost any entity you can think of. You'll even find phone numbers and email addresses for getting in touch with the companies, which can be hard to find sometimes.

Instant Logo Search: Find Any Logo Quickly

If you're writing about a company, whether for school or for a blog post, having quick access to an official logo is really handy. Instant Logo Search aims to be a tool for quickly finding and downloading SVG vectors or PNG images of almost any company's logo.

Just head to the site and search for any company: logos will quickly pop up. If the logo you want can't be found, consider contributing it to help out the next person.

We've talked about sites for finding vector art in the past, including some that provide logos. But Instant Logo Search is faster than anything for this purpose we've seen before.

Battle Of the Internet Giants: Watch Internet Companies Profit in Realtime

It's hard to imagine how much money Internet giants like Apple and Google pull in, but this site can help. It shows a realtime counter, from the moment you opened the page, of how much money various tech giants have made. It's an estimate, but stunning nonetheless.

It's important to find out the Internet companies you use make money, because it gives you an idea of how companies are likely to treat customers. For example: Facebook profits from your data, so protecting your privacy may never be their top priority. Apple, meanwhile, makes its money from hardware sales, meaning they're probably less concerned about maintaining the ad-driven free Internet than a company like Google. It all comes back to how the Internet takes shape, so pay attention and follow the money.

CrunchBase: Information About Any Tech Company

If you want to dig in more and learn about tech companies, CrunchBase is a great place to look. This is a database outlining where tech companies are located, who the key people behind them are, and who is investing in startups. It's a user-contributed wiki, and tends to be updated quickly.

Investors use this site regularly, but it's also useful and fascinating for enthusiasts. For one thing, learning about startups is fun, but it's also a great tool for tracking the history of companies that one day could be huge.

Makerbase: Information About Regular People Who Make Cool Things

Of course, not every cool website or app is made by a big company: plenty are made by individual people. The Maker community is responsible for tons of websites and apps linked to in this column and on MakeUseOf, and if you find one such site you like, chances are you'll enjoy more of their work.

Makerbase is a user-contributed site that lets you find out who is behind the sites you've enjoyed, and find other work created by them. It's a relatively new site, but browsing it I quickly found several cool things I wasn't previously aware of. Dive in and see what you can find.

How Do You Learn About Companies?

There are plenty of other places to learn about companies. Wikipedia is an obvious choice, of course, and plenty of companies use Twitter to communicate with their customers, so that's always an option as well.

I want to know which resources you've found useful, though. Point to any resources you've found useful in the comments below, okay? I'm looking forward to seeing what you know about.