Tag Archives: Mary Kwak

About 4584 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Web Awards 2000: Community

First place Posted Notes Company: PostNet International Franchise Corp. Web address: www.postnet.net Why it won: Its sophisticated extranet helps franchisees help themselves. Company revenues: $5 million (excluding franchise revenues) Site-launch cost: $10,000 Judge’s view: “If you can do something constructive at a site that enables you to see your results quickly with lots of high customer-service touch, you’ve got a winner.” –Randy Hinrichs “Help! How can we promote our color-copying service?” “What are the rules and regulations for shipping wine?” “Does anyone offer cell/pager service?” “Do you provide health insurance for employees?” Those are the typical sorts of questions that roll into PostNet International Franchise Corp. every day. Once upon a time, the Henderson, Nev., company’s 31-person staff would have handled them one by one. Today hundreds of volunteers — the company’s own franchisees — share the load. PostNet’s Franchisee Web allows PostNet, which franchises postal- and business-service centers, to harness the energy and knowledge of its business licensees in more than 25 countries worldwide. In addition, the company uses the Web to deliver a wide array of services to its customers — those same 700-plus franchisees. The Franchisee Web message boards give users a chance to solve problems, celebrate triumphs, and sometimes just vent. More than 90% of the franchisees regularly visit the message boards, says PostNet executive vice-president Brian Spindel, who cofounded the company in 1992. But a core group of 50 or 60 users provide 80% of the input. Message boards provide PostNet’s management with critical feedback, says Spindel, who checks in four or five times a day but usually doesn’t participate. When franchisees want input from headquarters, they’ll request it. “Then we’ll know it’s time to jump in with both feet and let them know what we really think,” he says. The password-protected message boards were the first feature available when PostNet launched the Franchisee Web, in 1997. The company later added many functions in response to users’ requests. Now the site houses archived newsletters, links to approved vendors, and downloadable marketing materials (including TV commercials and jingles that can be sampled online). In addition, it lets franchisees upload customer databases to a central server. Using that information, PostNet handles direct-mail campaigns on its franchisees’ behalf, a utility that Spindel calls the company’s “killer marketing app.” Such efforts have paid off in increased franchisee communication and involvement, Spindel says. And consequently, revenues have grown, according to PostNet president, CEO, and cofounder Steven Greenbaum. “In the last few years,” he explains, “our annual increase in same-store sales has been in excess of 20%, and we think that’s a direct result of [franchisees'] ability to learn and share.” Most of the creative and design work on PostNet’s extranet has been done in-house. Spindel and Greenbaum chose the features, based on franchisees’ feedback, and PostNet’s two-person graphics department designed the user-friendly look and feel. The company has outsourced most of its programming to a local Internet service provider, which also hosts the site. In the future, however, PostNet plans to handle those tasks on its own. “We’d like a bit more control,” Spindel explains. That’s not all that’s changing. Last year the company invested $10,000 in developing a new site, PostNetOnline.com, that drives profits from E-commerce, such as online orders for business cards, to franchisees. This year PostNet is building individual franchisee Web sites and plans to add an HR section to the Franchisee Web. Meanwhile, the site remains a work in progress. “Any time I’m on a Web page,” says Spindel, “I look at it, and I kind of steal ideas.” –Mary Kwak Second place Track It Down Company: Northwest Research Group Web address: www.nwrg.com Why it won: A password-protected site gives clients access to research 24 hours a day. Company revenues: $2.3 million Site-launch cost: $10,000 Judge’s view: “This is what the Web was intended to do — link information and people.” –Randy Hinrichs Don’t try telling Rebecca Elmore-Yalch “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” The founder of Northwest Research Group, a custom-market-research company with offices in Seattle and Boise, Idaho, has prospered as both a doer and a teacher. In the mid-1980s, when Elmore-Yalch was teaching marketing research at the University of Washington, people started coming to her for help with research projects. “I fixed a few and suggested that maybe they should have me start from the beginning and do it right,” she explains. Fifteen years later, NWRG has conducted telephone surveys, run focus groups, and buttonholed straphangers for customers like the city of Seattle, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Amtrak. As part of its contract with Amtrak, NWRG built a password-protected addition to its Web site in 1997. The Research Site, as the area is known, allows Amtrak staffers to search all of NWRG’s reports online. Some 30 users regularly visit the site, usually looking for the key fact or finding — for example, that 30% of Amtrak travelers are first-time riders — that will turn a run-of-the-mill presentation into a home run. The Web site also provides answers to routine statistical queries, which frees NWRG’s 10-person research staff to address higher-level issues. Now when customers call the researchers, it’s usually for a more interesting discussion about what the data actually mean. And because customers can find facts on their own, NWRG no longer has to charge for looking things up. “It doesn’t look like we’re nickel-and-diming them every time they have a question,” Elmore-Yalch says. But the real payoff for NWRG’s customers, she believes, has little to do with money. “It just makes them look really smart, and that’s what our business is about,” she says. –M.K. Third place Automating an Automaker Company: Badgett Constructors LLC Web address: www.iceas.com Why it won: The site offers a better — and cheaper — way to keep construction projects rolling. Revenues: $26 million Site launch cost: $100,000 Judge’s view: “The best application for any business is to build the business processes online, so everyone can ‘live in the data.” –Randy Hinrichs When it comes to changing course, the turning radius of a corporate giant like Ford is probably closer to that of those unfortunately large Excursions than, say, a diminutive Escort coupe. It took a small company, Badgett Constructors, in Louisville, to grab the wheel and bang a U-ie with its project-management extranet, called the Internet Contracting, Estimating and Accounting System, or ICEAS for short. Badgett, which manages construction at Ford’s Louisville assembly plant, has automated the way projects get done and set a new standard for Ford contractors in the process. The guy in the driver’s seat is Gerald Carrico, Badgett’s project manager for the plant. Carrico thought that giving Ford access to electronic versions of job cost estimates, invoices, minority-worker data, and project-status reports would save his team a lot of photocopying — not to mention saving the company a pile of money. He also wanted to improve communication and accountability. “Sometimes engineers would tell us about a project they wanted us to estimate, but a lot of information would be left vague,” Carrico says. “I wanted them to write up a scope.” Carrico called on O’Bryan Worley, who happens to be the daughter of Badgett owner and manager Kurt Broecker, and who is now a professional Web designer. Worley had the site purring like a kitten in just two months. One early speed bump: getting the engineers to use the site. Some of them didn’t even have Internet access at first, so Ford had to hook them up. Within eight months, some 300 Ford engineers and other contractors at 10 plants were entering data and retrieving reports. When anyone adds new information, the site automatically sends out an E-mail to all the appropriate people, which helps to ensure accountability. Carrico estimates that ICEAS saves his company $75,000 a year in such things as photocopying, materials, and manpower, including 15 to 20 hours a week in clerical time. Ford gave Badgett a best-practices award, and Worley is now operating the site as a separate business that serves Badgett and 11 other construction companies. –Jill Hecht Maxwell Conversation with Randy Hinrichs Judge: Community Think intranets are dull? Listen to Randy Hinrichs for three minutes and you’ll never feel that way again. To the exuberant Hinrichs, author of Intranets: What’s the Bottom Line?, an intranet is no less than the foundation for a company’s success. Hinrichs knows a thing or two about creating powerful virtual spaces. He manages a team of developers who are creating next-generation learning environments at Microsoft. His mission is grand: to democratize learning and make it available anytime, anywhere, for anybody. Here’s Hinrichs on the awards: On his favorite site: “Badgett Constructors has created collaboration and communication and seamless workflow [mechanisms] that allow them to constantly improve work process and relationships, which is even more profound than improving communication.” On getting results from your site: “If I had to pick one thing that makes a Web site successful, it is that there’s always a feedback mechanism from the average user, and that the average user gets a response — not just ‘I heard you,’ but ‘Check this out.’ And that’s what Badgett is doing. You can bid online, order online, interact online, and everyone can see the results of your work.” On building a business: “You’re not going to be a good E-commerce site unless you’re good inside. If you want to go out and be a company that says ‘Our products rock,’ [you have to say] ‘Come inside and see the way our business rocks.” –Elaine Appleton Grant Annual Web Awards 2000 General Excellence Marketing Customer Service ROI Innovation Community Judges Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4584 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Bulletin Board

Getting In on the E-Signature Game Over the centuries, signatures have come in many forms, from a simple mark to a copperplate John Hancock to the imprint of an intricately carved ivory seal. Now the U.S. Congress has added “electronic sound, symbol, or process” to the list. That’s how electronic signature is defined in the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, which went into effect on October 1. In principle, the term’s broad definition means that signing one’s name can be as simple as sending an E-mail or pressing 1 on a Touch-Tone phone. But companies doing business online could opt for more sophisticated technologies should they desire a higher level of security and comfort. Anyone can create digital signatures using common desktop applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, Netscape Communicator, and Adobe Acrobat. While those signatures are images, Montreal-based onSign, a unit of Silanis Technology, offers free software for script aficionados that embeds a digital signature in the image of a user’s handwritten name. A digital signature operates by matching two “keys” — very large numbers used to encrypt information. You use your private key to generate a signature. You then send (or store online) a digital certificate containing your public key with each signed document. The certificate explains who you are to the document’s recipient, and the public key allows him or her to verify your signature. If the keys don’t match — or if the document has been altered since you signed it — the verification attempt will fail. In many simple digital-signature programs, users issue their own certificates. That method may be adequate among correspondents who know one another, explains Lisa Pretty, executive director of the PKI Forum, a public-key-technology industry group. If additional security is necessary, companies such as Dallas-based AlphaTrust Corp. can fill the breach by issuing users a digital ID that allows the recipient of their documents to verify their identities and validate their electronic signatures. In the end, ensuring 100% validity when it comes to digital identities may not be possible. But signature verification in the paper world isn’t foolproof either, says Rick Lane, director of E-commerce and Internet technology at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “There’s no difference,” he says. “Those concerns don’t change.” –Mary Kwak The E-Sign Law: Just the Facts Electronic signatures and records have the same legal validity as handwritten signatures. No one can be required to use or accept electronic signatures or records. States can preempt the new law by adopting the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (which is technology neutral) or by enacting laws that similarly do not specify which technologies qualify as electronic signatures. The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act does not apply to certain documents, including wills, divorce papers, and court orders. Source: Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act. High-Wired Competition As recently as five years ago, nothing in New York City symbolized the financial ruthlessness of the 1980s more than a vacant building at 55 Broad St., just west of the New York Stock Exchange. Once the home of Drexel Burnham Lambert Group Inc., the 400,000-square-foot structure sat empty for five years after the giant securities firm collapsed into bankruptcy, in 1990. Desperate to find tenants, the Rudin Management Co. upgraded the building by installing state-of-the-art wiring, then offered the space to high-tech start-ups at bargain rates. From the start, Rudin Management executives insisted they were creating a community, a place where creative entrepreneurs could “cross-pollinate.” John Gilbert, Rudin’s chief operating officer, says tenants cooperate in a variety of ways, from embarking on joint ventures to sharing ideas and services. Ultimately, that’s how it worked for Thomas Pennell, CEO of Pennell Venture Partners, which has been a tenant at 55 Broad St. for more than four years. Initially, he says, he didn’t interact much with his neighbors, mostly other struggling start-ups. More recently, though, the building has attracted bigger, better-known technology companies; as a result, Pennell says, he’s done some deals with his workplace neighbors and expects more to follow. But other people get a little nervous about working side by side with potential competitors. Rudin Management “put a nice spin on it,” says Charles Smith-Semedo, CEO of NewMedia Technology Corp., based at 55 Broad. But in Smith’s opinion, any serious networking happens outside the front door. “When you get on the elevator, everybody stops talking,” he says. Meanwhile, even the most community-minded businesses watch their neighbors for signs of failure. When one Internet start-up directly below Pennell’s space failed, the venture capitalist says, “we just took their furniture and wished them well.” –Anne Stuart Healthy Skepticism for ASPs Application service providers (ASPs), software companies that manage data for you on the Web, are struggling to convince small-business owners that the ASP model is a secure one. Now Accpac, a subsidiary of Computer Associates, has started one of a few partner programs in which accounting firms host Accpac applications on their Web sites. Through those programs, small-business owners can begin using the ASP offerings through companies they already know and trust. Another small-business anxiety: even though the whole point of the ASP model is that it allows data to live anywhere, many CEOs want their data to remain physically close to home. So Accpac has built regional data centers. CEOs “like it that their data is in a building they can drive to, surrounded by fences and guard dogs,” says Robert Lavery, vice-president of strategic alliances for Accpac, only half joking. And small-business owners are absolutely right to be wary, says Joseph Fuccillo, a senior vice-president at Xand Corp., a Hawthorne, N.Y., company that provides hosting hardware and services to ASPs. “If you’re going to outsource any business-critical data, you should go see the facility and make sure it’s not in someone’s garage,” he says. –Jill Hecht Maxwell Things We Love Pat O’Neill’s monthly mailings to prospective new accounts were getting a little stale. Her solution: CD-ROM business cards. First she filmed a three-minute commercial for O’Neill Benefits Group Brokerage, her four-employee benefits-intermediary business in Boulder, Colo., and sent it to Microbizcard Inc., of Toronto, which burned it onto CDs the size of business cards. O’Neill paid about $2 per disc, though Microbizcard has since dropped its prices to $1.50 per unit with a purchase of 500 discs. Microbizcard offers the discs in the customer’s choice of 12 standard shapes, such as squares and ovals, or cuts them into custom designs, such as a pair of boxing gloves or a can of soda. CD-ROM business cards have been around for about three years. What’s new, says Microbizcard vice-president Dionne Skinner, is that the cards can now hold all kinds of multimedia goodies and even have E-commerce capability. The downside: Some computers won’t play the business cards without an adapter. Still, O’Neill remains eager to mail out her multimedia missives along with the regular, paper business cards. “One day CD-ROM business cards will be all over the place, and once people have a pile of them, they won’t stick them into their machines,” she says. “But right now, even if they pop them in for a minute, I look good.” –J.H.M. Tracking Tech Time At first glance the job he’d done on the pet-themed Web site seemed a job well done to Todd Jones. His Internet consulting company, Semtor Inc., had built the site efficiently — or so he thought. But when it came time to bid on the next job, Jones took a closer look. It turned out that his company had invested 1,724 person-hours in the pet site, 124 more than it had figured into the price. “That cost us about $6,000,” Jones says. Jones knew the exact numbers because Semtor, based in Weston, Fla., uses professional services automation (PSA) software from Toronto-based Changepoint Corp. ( www.changepoint.com). Invented by techies for techies, it helps consultants figure out what to charge before a job begins and how to track their services once a project is under way. The software is licensed for a onetime fee of $500 to $2,000 per user. Customers can also rent it from Changepoint over the Internet for $70 and up per user per month. Companies are also using Changepoint to help their own technology departments track their costs — and justify their budgets. For instance, at Integris Health Inc., a health-care network based in Oklahoma City, the 160-person IT division is planning to use the software to send dummy bills to other departments to chart how it’s spending its time. “When the VP of a different division says, ‘I don’t get anything out of IT,” explains Integris IT director Cynthia Hilterbrand, “we can say, ‘That’s interesting. We gave you 2,000 man-hours.” PSA’s ultimate value may be as a management tool for projecting costs for future work. Jones says that the detailed information that Changepoint provided on the pet-site job allowed Semtor to bid for its next job more accurately. Integris, too, plans to use its new knowledge about IT work demands to budget IT staff time. –Jane Salodof MacNeil Outsourcing IT: What It Costs Application Maintenance: $250,000 to $100 million for a three year to five year contract Hardware Support: $2,000 to $1 million annually Application Service Provider: Either $20 to $2,000 per user per month or up to 10% of revenues per transaction Call Center: $100,000 to $2 million annually Web-Site Hosting: $20 to $100,000 monthly Custom Development Project: $2,000 to $100 million, depending on the length of the contract Source: Ian S. Hayes, president, Clarity Consulting Inc., Hamilton, Mass. Wanted: Tomb Raider Computer games are really starting to get down to business. The University of California at Irvine is launching a 10-course program next semester called Gaming Studies. The program melds graphic arts, computer science, social sciences, and performing arts. UC assistant professor Robert Nideffer, who got the ball rolling and holds graduate degrees in computer arts and sociology himself, expects the gaming-studies field to become even more popular than film studies has been. Several other schools have gotten on the bandwagon as well. Nongaming companies should keep an eye out for gaming grads. “Building a game is a very sophisticated project-management environment,” notes Brian Reithel, president of the Foundation for Information Technology Education, the research arm of the Association of Information Technology Professionals. –J.H.M. Hot Tip: Limo as Mobile Office As Steve Healis’s janitorial-services company, Avalon Building Maintenance Inc., of Anaheim, Calif., was expanding, the CEO found himself spending 8 to 10 hours a week just driving to customer sites and division offices throughout southern California. To catch up on the work he wasn’t getting done while on the road, Healis ended up working extra nights and weekends. His solution: a mobile office. Healis and division managers now travel in one of three vans or a limousine, all outfitted with an inverter, a device that lets them use laptops, printers, and fax machines en route. The vehicles each cost about $55,000, plus $1,000 for the inverter. Janitors who do detail work at customer sites do the driving. When Healis visits potential customers, he can go out to the car, work up a proposal, and, he says, return it to the customer five minutes later. He credits the mobile offices with allowing him and his managers to handle more work during the company’s growth spurt — $150,000 a month in business each, compared with the $100,000 they did a month before they got the equipped cars. (Avalon Building Maintenance is on track to do $8 million in business in 2000.) But Healis acknowledges that he sometimes gets a bit uncomfortable riding around in the limo. Referring to the few times the paparazzi have mistaken him for a celebrity when he pulls up to a job on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive, he says, “I just want to say, ‘No, I’m the janitor!’ ” –Julia Ramey Seeing Blue What is it about the color blue? We’ve noticed more and more companies — especially high-tech and Internet businesses — copping the cool tone for use in their names. Perhaps CEOs want their businesses to grow up to be IBM, or maybe they’re just huge Cookie Monster fans. Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute, in Carlstadt, N.J., counsels companies on how customers react to colors. “Invariably, when we show people a blue swatch, we get the same kind of response: words like constant, loyal, dependable, and always there for you,” Eiseman says. “It comes from the mind’s association of blue with the sky and water — things that are never going to go away.” In other words, true-blue. Here’s a list of just a few of the blue-toned businesses we’ve come across: Bleu22 Studios Blue Dog Multimedia Blue Dot Interactive Bluefly Inc. Blue Hypermedia Blue Martini Software Bluemercury Blue Moon Internet Services Blueprint Technologies Blue Pumpkin Software Blue Shoe Technologies Blue Sky Internet Inc. –J.H.M. Who’s Afraid of E-Commerce? Less than a fifth of U.S. small businesses sell online, according to IDC, a research group in Framingham, Mass. But never underestimate the power of the Net. By 2005, Americans will spend more than $632 billion in stores as a direct result of research they’ve conducted online — more than triple what they’ll fork over when shopping electronically, says Jupiter Research senior analyst Ken Cassar of New York City. –J.H.M. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4737 days ago Telecom and Wireless

Cut-Rate Collaboration

CEO’s Start-Up Toolkit: Intranets Free intranet services provide a simple way to communicate with far-flung employees, as well as with customers, suppliers, and, yes, even your spouse Kid Cardona was ready for a chuckle when he clicked on the E-mail message that offered free “intranets.” “When I first saw it, I had never heard of the word intranet,” says Cardona, who is the owner of the Infamous Cartoon Posse, in San Antonio. “I guess that’s a term that’s used in big business, but I’m a little guy. So I said, ‘Boy, did they misspell this. I wonder what else they screwed up.” Curious, he opened the message, which touted a new information-sharing service from a company called Intranets.com Inc. It was no typo. Intranets.com, based in Woburn, Mass., is a leader in the market for free intranet services. Intranets — basically, internal networks based on Internet technologies — have been around for about five years. Initially, the Web-like platforms were embraced by large corporations, which found that publishing internal directories and employee manuals was easier to do electronically — and using intranets was also cheaper than churning out paper updates every few months. More recently, intranets have become easier for small companies (with limited tech teams) to create. And they have become more useful. Today, in addition to Web publishing, intranets typically feature a variety of collaborative tools, including document sharing, group calendars, online meetings, and bulletin boards. Intranets resemble the Internet in more than name. Users access intranets by means of browsers, pulling up pages that look and work just like pages on the Web. But while the Internet is a public space, intranets are private. Users generally need a password to move from the Internet to an intranet; in some cases, the two may not be connected at all. Until recently, big companies could afford to build and run their own intranets, but many smaller businesses could not. Small companies had two alternatives — assuming, that is, that someone had decided it was worth having an intranet at all. The first option was a prepackaged intranet-in-a-box, such as Cobalt Networks Inc.’s Qube 2. Priced at around $1,000, the Qube 2 is a six-pound box that includes the hardware and software for setting up file sharing, discussion groups, and E-mail on a local area network. For companies without a LAN, the alternative was an intranet hosted by an outside service provider. For example, HotOffice Technologies Inc., in Boca Raton, Fla., provides templates for creating and customizing intranet pages. HotOffice stores the data; subscribers have password protected access to the information over the Web. A two-time PC Magazine Editors’ Choice, the subscription-based service is priced from $9.95 to $12.95 per user per month. With some quick clicks on a template, you can have your own private Web site, open only to the privileged few. Now a few companies have taken the hosted model to the next logical step. Following close on the heels of free home pages, free Internet access, and free PCs, free intranets have entered the fray. Intranets.com CEO Steve Crummey once sold shrink-wrapped intranet software at $5,000 a pop but recast his business model last year with help from Idealab founder Bill Gross. After paring down his software, Crummey began offering a free version in August 1999. So far the company has signed up more than 185,000 groups, ranging from 2 to 800 members in size, Crummey says. In January, HotOffice Technologies countered with a free service of its own. The two services are similar in features and design. A couple differences: Intranets.com lets users pick their own domain name; HotOffice does not. Intranets.com also requires that users fill out a survey so that information about their company can be used to customize their site. A few clicks later, and the intranet is up and running. By clicking on links, users can post announcements, manage calendars and databases, and upload files. And employees — as well as customers, suppliers, and anyone else the user invites — are free to log on. Group scheduling is a popular feature with the free-intranet crowd. Kid Cardona, originally skeptical about the worth of any free service, today uses his site to schedule gigs for the Infamous Cartoon Posse’s six caricature artists, who are based in Austin, Houston, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. Before signing up with Intranets.com, Cardona spent hours chasing Posse members on the phone. Now that the cartoonists check the intranet regularly, his phone time is down to 20 minutes a week. Doris Boeckman, a consultant with Missouri’s Department of Public Health, values the ability to share information quickly and easily with clients in 16 communities across the state. Boeckman, who also opted to use Intranets.com, works with community-based groups on issues like elder care and substance abuse. Every week on her site she posts material about funding opportunities and upcoming events. “We’ve really cut back on mailings,” she says. With an intranet, “at the click of a button, it’s there.” The price for that convenience is an advertising bar that runs across the top of each page. In addition, Intranets.com charges for telephone support. Although HotOffice’s phone support is free, the long-distance call to the support line is not. Both companies offer free support by E-mail but charge for storage beyond the multimegabyte first chunk. (Individual users get 25MB free with Intranets.com; each registered company gets a total of 40MB free from HotOffice. That may sound generous, but if users post a lot of graphics, the bill will quickly mount.) So far, users seem satisfied with the bargain. “We’re all on the Internet so much, you have a tendency to put the ads out of your mind,” says Tom McKenna, director of client relations at LiquiDebt Systems Inc., a 12-person credit-collection company in Warrenville, Ill. McKenna, who signed on with HotOffice, compares the service favorably with his experience using a free Internet service provider. “The free-ISP ads really bark at you,” he says. “The HotOffice ads are more subtle — but you know they’re there.” McKenna hasn’t seen any difference in performance since LiquiDebt switched from the fee-based version of HotOffice to the free service late last year. But computer consultant Glenn Weadock, author of Small Business Networking for Dummies, cautions that graphics-intensive banner ads can significantly boost download time, depending on the speed of the user’s Internet connection. In addition, the ads may distract employees and detract from the professionalism of the site — especially in the eyes of customers. Scheduling virtual employees? It’s easier with an intranet. Security is another hot button. Intranets.com and HotOffice both promise customers that their data is stored at state-of-the-art data centers featuring sophisticated firewalls, round-the-clock surveillance, and server backup every night. According to Kneko Burney, a research director at Cahners In-Stat Group, those safeguards go far beyond what a typical small business could provide on its own. But the ultimate issue may be control. As Weadock says, “I’m sure 99% of the time the providers will behave responsibly, but if they have a slip, it’s out of your hands.” And you can’t get everything for nothing. More sophisticated knowledge-management applications, like fine-grained searching, generally can’t easily be built on top of Web-based intranets, according to Ian Campbell, vice-president of research at Nucleus Research Inc., a technology-consulting firm based in Wellesley, Mass. But for some business users, free intranets really are a great deal. Says Campbell, “They’re fantastic for collaboration on smaller projects, even in a big company, or for very small companies where the company is the project.” Mary Kwak is a freelance writer in Cambridge, Mass. If this is Tuesday… In our household, we’re time-management — or perhaps mismanagement — pros. My husband and I both have jobs that take us across the country and around the world. Yesterday I got back from San Francisco. Tomorrow he heads for Istanbul. In our ongoing effort to coordinate our schedules we’ve moved from a whiteboard (not enough room) to a wall-mounted year-at-a-glance (clashed with our decor) to multiple calendars (his, hers, ours) to not-quite-matching PalmPilots. So I jumped at the chance to give Web-based “calendaring” a try. Getting my free intranet from Intranets.com was easy. Six minutes after I typed in my chosen domain name, onceinabluemoon.intranets.com was mine — complete with dancing Visa cards at the top of the page. Scheduling is straightforward. I click on the calendar and enter a title, date, and time; then I have to decide whether I want to be E-mailed a reminder before the event. My husband enters his commitments, and we negotiate possible conflicts offline. Since we started using our intranet, the number of conversations that start with “What do you mean you told me…” has sharply declined. But there’s one thing the intranet can’t do: help us say no. Which is why I’m looking for hotels with good Internet access in Tokyo, Seattle, and Beijing. Free Intranets Here’s a selected list of sites on which you can get something for nothing. And share it. eGroups HotOffice Technologies Intranets.com Planet Intra Wizmo Yahoo Connected Office For more on the gear you really need to start and grow your small business, see our CEO’s Start-Up Toolkit. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4737 days ago Search Engine Optimization

Bulletin Board

Of RÉsumÉs and Rap Sheets If you’re launching or growing your company and feeling a little desperate for tech talent, you may be tempted to hire first and think later. Bad move. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, a huge number of candidates — at all levels — lie on their rÉsumÉs. More than half the companies surveyed by the organization in 1998 found that job candidates had falsified information about their previous employment. John Putzier, president of FirStep Inc., a human-resources consulting firm in Prospect, Pa., says free-form job titles make matters even more confusing. “If I’m interviewing a ‘guru,’ is she a project manager or just a wacko?” Putzier says. The worst-case scenario, he says, can lead to a negligent-hiring suit. “If someone has been convicted of assault, and you could have found that out and didn’t, you could be putting the lives of employees, customers, and clients in danger,” he warns. Fortunately, there’s a way to protect your company. First, make any job offer contingent on a background check. Then, to save time, hire a screening service to do the checking for you. Third-party services, like Laborchex, in Jackson, Miss., can turn such requests around in a matter of hours or a few days at most. Laborchex, which took its service online a year ago, now plays Sherlock Holmes for 1,000 clients. For an average cost of $70 a candidate, Laborchex staffers poll the applicant’s past employers and gather driving and criminal records, credit reports, and other publicly available information. The snooping is all aboveboard, says Laborchex owner and president Rene Barbee. “We make sure we have a legal release from the applicant before we do the review,” he says. However, hiring an outsider to do your background checks is potentially perilous, says lawyer Julie Moore, president of Employment Practices Group, a training and consulting company in Windham, N.H. “A person can sue you for what your independent contractors do,” she says. So if you do hire a background checker, cover your you-know-what. Ask for references and a copy of the company’s insurance policy. Make sure the company complies with the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act. Finally, says Moore, get an indemnification contract. “You want to make sure the background-check firm will pay the defense costs and any settlement if it was their wrongdoing that brought on the suit,” she says. –Jill Hecht Maxwell Your Average Joe It’s no surprise that nontechnical professionals, such as photographers and real estate agents, consider the Web a valuable business tool. But what is surprising is that such Main Street proprietors are now buying up more domain names than their high-tech counterparts are — further evidence that the Web is, well, everywhere. Top First-Time Domain-Name Buyers, by Occupation 1. Photographers 2. Attorneys 3. Real estate agents 4. Church officers and clergy 5. Insurance agents 6. Internet service providers 7. Restaurateurs 8. Physicians and surgeons 9. Software professionals 10. Accountants Source: Network Solutions Inc., January 2000 Virtual Swap Meet At yet2.com, one company’s mothballed technology can be another’s moneymaking treasure. Launched earlier this year, the Web site is intended to streamline the clunky process of researching, selling, buying, trading, and licensing technologies. According to yet2.com, based in Cambridge, Mass., businesses spend more than $100 billion annually on research and development for technologies that, for one reason or another, they end up wanting to sell. Yet2.com’s mission: turning that research into revenues. The company provides businesses with a searchable online marketplace for their technologies. Successful deals often result from online connections made between buyers and sellers whose paths otherwise might never have crossed. In one early transaction, for instance, a home-appliances company was negotiating with an aerospace company. Like any good matchmaker, yet2.com keeps interested parties anonymous until they agree to an introduction. Buyers and sellers then negotiate their own deal. Yet2.com’s cut varies depending on the deal’s bottom line but never exceeds $50,000. (Companies also pay an annual fee to use the site.) The forum’s first 200 registered users range from lone inventors to members of the Fortune 500, says Conrad Langenhagen, director of strategic planning. Small companies may benefit by finding research done by bigger companies, he says. And start-ups and soloists may be able to sell their own innovations online. Thomas G. Field Jr., professor of law at Franklin Pierce Law Center, in Concord, N.H., however, says electronic searches will never replace the traditional system of human brokers. Will yet2.com work? The answer is, of course, yet to come, Field says. But he calls the users’ costs relatively low compared with soaring R&D costs. “Even if the technology sales’ yield is one hit a year, what the hell, you’ve made back your investment,” he says. –Anne Stuart From the Life-Is-Too-Short File: If you’re an average adult Internet user, you’ll spend 23.5 months — nearly 17,500 hours — of your remaining life span online. If you’re under 30, it’s about 33 months. Over 50? Plan on staring at the screen for about a year. Moral: Pick an Internet service provider with an unlimited-use plan. Source: Cyber Dialogue Things We Love As everybody knows, whiteboards are an ephemeral medium. (Do the words Do Not Erase mean anything to you?) And clients can’t take them off-site and read them over. Electronic whiteboards that record what you write and print out, one board at a time, have been around for years, but they’re cumbersome, slow, and expensive, and they use Flintstones-era thermal paper. One day last spring on a flight to St. Louis, lawyer Dennis Brislawn read in Popular Mechanics about Mimio (from Virtual Ink Corp.; www.mimio.com; 877-696-4646). Mimio, which sells for $499 at the company’s online store, is a device that attaches to a regular whiteboard with suction cups and records a kind of animated movie of everything you write. Plug Mimio’s cord into a PC with Windows, and the computer saves the movie; you can play it back, rewind it, and fast-forward it. When Brislawn’s plane landed, he called Virtual Ink and had the folks there ship one of the units to the conference he was attending. He successfully used Mimio for his presentation to 300 lawyers. He is now hooked. Instead of saving his scribbling as one big graphic, Mimio’s software translates Brislawn’s words into a text file. He can shrink or enlarge individual elements as well as cut and paste them into other Windows documents. –J.H.M. Flushing Out Customers Attendees at a recent Internet conference were, well, bowled over to find that one exhibitor had laid claim to the toilets. A Connecticut company had bought exclusive rights to promote itself as the official “bathroom sponsor” at a Jupiter Communications event. And promote it did, posting its signs on rest-room walls and on stall doors. Even behind closed doors there was no escape: more ads decorated the inside of each stall. And in a modern twist on the gift-with-purchase concept, company employees gave departing rest-room patrons bottles of spring water labeled with the company’s name. Which, by the way, was FloNetwork. John Carroll, a media critic and managing editor of WGBH’s Greater Boston TV program, says marketing in bathrooms is inevitable in an era in which companies buy ads on airport baggage carousels. The free spring water, though — that’s a first. The message, Carroll says: “Not only did we catch you in here with all our ads, but we’re going to make sure you come back real soon.” FloNetwork, of Greenwich, Conn., an E-mail marketing company, couldn’t agree more. “You have a captive audience,” corporate communications director Beth Ghiloni says cheerfully. But others remain unconvinced about the taste of powder-room promotions. Sniffs Carroll: “They’re called privies for a reason.” –A.S. For Rent: Savvy CIO, Available Fridays It’s no secret to executives of small businesses that good tech help is extra hard to find these days. In a market where Ferraris and options are becoming the currency of choice, a few companies are turning to an extreme version of outsourcing: they’re renting chief information officers. “The idea behind CIO outsourcing is that you’re renting an officer of the company,” says Aberdeen Group senior analyst Stephen Lane. “Ideally, that’s someone who has the experience to get your company started with IT while you’re building your own organization.” CIO outsourcing goes beyond just hiring a consultant, Lane explains. Whereas a consultant carries out a particular job — be it coding or assessment or project management — an outsourced CIO becomes a member of the senior management team. Janet Kraus, CEO of Circles, has worked with both consultants and a rent-a-CIO. Janie Tremlett, founder of the CIO-outsourcing program at Breakaway Solutions, spent a year on call at Kraus’s Boston-based concierge-services company, working anywhere from one day a week to one day a month. Tremlett helped Kraus plan strategy, choose technology, design an IT organization, and even get financing. Circles then called in a development team from Breakaway — a full-service provider — to handle the implementation. On an all-cash basis, according to Tremlett, a client would typically pay about $40,000 to have a CIO on board once a week for three months. (The average salary for an experienced CIO in 1999 was $152,000 plus stock options and benefits, according to a Computerworld survey; in this year’s hotter high-tech job market, salaries can run even higher.) CEO Kraus valued the arrangement’s flexibility. In addition, Circles benefited from the fact that Breakaway serves a wide client base. “Janie wouldn’t talk about specifics, but she would try to bring the learning of other clients to bear,” Kraus recalls. The ultimate measure of Tremlett’s success may be the fact that she’s still working at Circles. Fifteen months after she began working with the concierge business, it had grown from 12 to 100 employees but still was relying on its outsourced CIO. –Mary Kwak Better than Invisible Ink? E-mail may seem to resemble shifting sand, but when it comes to staying power, those bits streaming through the ether might as well be carved in stone. Long after they’ve been forgotten, confidential strategic documents and tasteless jokes live on. And they can return to haunt the senders, as companies like Microsoft have learned all too painfully. Disappearing Inc., a San Francisco start-up, has developed a system that promises to make such problems vanish. The company’s Disappearing Email encrypts each message and assigns it a 128-bit key — essentially a code that “unlocks” the encryption. Then the message is sent on its way. The recipient reads the encrypted mail by automatically “borrowing” the key from one of Disappearing’s servers. If Disappearing’s software isn’t installed on the recipient’s computer, the message appears as a link to a Web site, also hosted by Disappearing. At the site the message will be joined with the key, decoded, and displayed. After a time specified by the sender, Disappearing throws away the key. The message may remain on a PC, on an E-mail server, or on backup tapes, but it would be impossible to read it. Slated for release to companies with more than 1,000 Microsoft Outlook users, Disappearing Email is designed as an Outlook add-on. It costs $4 per mailbox per month. Boro Marinkovich, president of BBM Solutions, a Toronto-based systems integrator, tested Disappearing Email for a client. Following a government investigation that had forced the client to turn over reams of electronic files, the company’s partners were eager to try out Disappearing with their 50 or so staff members. Three months into the test, Marinkovich reported no technical problems with the service. But Marinkovich flags possible lack of access to Disappearing’s servers as his greatest concern. If Disappearing’s system goes down, he points out, “you’re going to have a hard time reading your mail. That’s the potential Achilles’ heel in this whole design.” –M.K. The Quotable Entrepreneur “In this new economy, failure is not a bad thing. If you have enough activity in an area, and you have failures that are because of a market change or something similar, you will instantly get funded again. It’s hard to accept this, but it’s like after a forest fire. You have had all this burning, but then all around there’s new growth shooting up.” –Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks Inc., a $60-million provider of optical networking technology A Rose.com by Any Other Name What’s in a name? Possibly returns that beat the market by nearly 100%. That’s the conclusion reached by Michael Cooper, Orlin Dimitrov, and P. Raghavendra Rau, of the finance department at Purdue University. In a recent study of 95 businesses, they found that companies that had changed their names to include .com, .net, or Internet outdid the AMEX Inter@ctive Week Internet Index (also known as the @Net Index) by an average of 25% on the day of the change. (The @Net Index includes 50 companies involved in Internet infrastructure, access, content, and commerce, including AOL and Amazon.com.) The researchers also tracked 52 of those 95 companies over six months and reported that they outperformed the Index, on average, by a whopping 97%. Many companies in the sample were relative unknowns, and Cooper speculates that their obscurity may have contributed to the dramatic effect. “As soon as they change their names, they get caught in screens that traders are using to pick stocks,” Cooper explains. Traders buy, often without asking questions, and the price shoots up. Better-known companies, conversely, may be able to buck the dot-com trend. In March, Nasdaq-listed InfoSpace.com announced that it was dropping the ubiquitous suffix. Coincidence or not, that same day InfoSpace beat the @Net Index by 8%. –M.K. After changing their names to include .com, .net, or Internet, the companies outdid the @Net Index by an average of 25%. Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.