Tag Archives: Oklahoma City

About 2274 days ago Computer Security

Positive ID: All About Biometrics

Biometric identification — which instantly authenticates people by unique physical traits such as eye structure, voice patterns and handprints — may seen like something out of X-Men or Star Trek. But it’s neither fantasy nor futuristic. In fact, biometric technology has been around for years. It’s even a growth industry: The worldwide market for biometric devices is projected to nearly triple in the next few years, rising from $2.1 billion in 2006 to $5.7 billion in 2010, according to the International Biometric Group, a New York City-based research and consulting firm. Meanwhile, biometric capability is increasingly available in products that are affordable for even the smallest businesses. More surprising than the devices’ existence, though, are the ways in which some companies are putting them to use. First, a bit of history. Particularly after the terrorist attacks in 2001, security experts were keenly interested in using biometrics for positive identification. The main goal then: keeping unauthorized users from gaining access to government or company buildings, computer systems and information. Today, some organizations are using biometric technologies to keep outsiders out, but others are finding the technology — especially the less-expensive fingertip and hand scanners — far more useful for in-house security purposes. For example: Tracking time and attendance: “Buddy-punching” — when employees manually punch each other’s time cards to falsify their work hours — has been the bane of small businesses for decades. Biometric systems can end that practice by verifying employees’ identities as they clock in and out, most commonly through a fingertip or handprint reader. Added bonus: Many systems also compile payroll data, replacing a tedious manual task. Systems begin at about $350. Replacing or enhancing passwords: It’s no secret that many people’s system passwords are a cinch to decipher. Case in point: In a 2005 in-house security test, a California credit union’s IT team used a tool that cracked about 80 percent of employee passwords within 30 seconds. IT staffers instructed workers to adopt stronger passwords in keeping with the organization’s security standards, then repeated the test. The results weren’t encouraging: The team still cracked 70 percent of the new, stronger passwords. So the credit union began using a combination of fingertip scanners and automatic, randomly generated passwords to authenticate system users. Bank officials say the change greatly improved those security audits and reduced password-administration costs, an expense that IT research firm Gartner Inc. says costs companies an average of $200-$300 per user per year. Fingertip readers begin at around $100 per device. Securing dangerous or controlled substances: Businesses in a wide range of industries use biometric devices — with hand-readers being a particularly popular option — to help monitor access to toxic chemicals, radioactive waste, narcotic drugs and other potentially hazardous materials. Hand-reader security devices range from about $1,000 to $3,000 or more per device, depending on features. Preventing ID-card sharing: Some businesses now use biometrics to keep multiple customers from sharing a single account or pass card. An Oklahoma City-based chain of tanning salons, for instance, installed fingertip readers at all its locations to authenticate paying customers, thus preventing people from simply loaning their membership cards to friends. (A company spokeswoman says the scanners don’t store a complete fingerprint — just a big enough piece to confirm the user’s identity.) Biometric technologies aren’t infallible. Systems may fail to recognize an authorized user or detect an imposter. In one well-publicized case a few years ago, a Japanese cryptographer copied a fingerprint using a gelatin substance. He then tested the duplicate fingerprint on several commercial scanners — all of which “recognized” it as real. In addition, many people view the use of biometric security measures as an invasion of privacy. In testifying before Congress, Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program for the American Civil Liberties Union, has cited biometrics as yet another example of America’s movement toward becoming “a surveillance society.” But for businesses needing to know exactly who’s got their hands on which pieces of company equipment or information, biometrics are likely to be an increasingly attractive option. For additional information: International Biometrics Group LLC U.S. Department of Defense Biometrics Tutorial

About 2517 days ago Mobility Tips and Tricks

Wi-Fi for the Masses

It looks like a large Styrofoam takeout container. The 14-pound box would fit into a backpack were it not for the two antennas, set well apart. It can withstand subfreezing temperatures and 165-mph winds; it’s even lightningproof. With the lid bolted down tightly, the box offers no clue as to what’s inside. But disassembled, it reveals intricate innards that look like nothing so much as a city viewed from a plane: A million tiny wires crisscross like streets and weave among square parks the size of your thumbnail. The magic of the box occurs when you mount it on the horizontal arm of a city lamppost, so that its long ears reach up to the sky. Install 30 of them per square mile (which isn’t hard, since an installer using a single tool can put up a unit in 15 minutes) and they immediately begin communicating with one another via radio waves. Data, the same information that flows through the wired Internet, begins traveling between them. Establish some hub connections to usher the data back onto the Net and you’ve created a wireless network that can transmit signals all over real, life-size cities–into parks, schools, juice joints, bars, offices, playgrounds, and homes. The boxes, known as routers or nodes, are made by Tropos Networks, a Silicon Valley upstart that’s landed in the middle of a burgeoning movement among U.S. cities to create municipal wireless networks, or metroscale Wi-Fi–essentially, an effort to deliver wireless bandwidth to the masses. Since Tropos began selling its equipment in 2002, dozens of municipalities have signed up. The Twin Cities suburb of Chaska, Minnesota, built a wireless network to cover its 16 square miles and serve all 18,000 of its residents. Corpus Christi, Texas, bought 300 Tropos nodes to cover 24 square miles and has since decided to expand to 147 square miles. As it rebuilds in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans plans to cover the whole town with a Tropos network. This summer, Anaheim, California, will hit the switch, giving 325,000 citizens across 50 square miles ubiquitous broadband Internet access. Tropos-powered networks also are in the offing in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Launched with what Bill Gurley, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Tropos investor, calls “four guys under 30 and an algorithm,” the Sunnyvale-based company spent less than $3 million getting its first product to market. Since then, it has grown into the leading equipment provider in this incipient market, with more than $15 million in revenue in 2005 and a projected $45 million in 2006. It has had roughly 350 customers to date–including some in far-flung locales such as Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Doha, Qatar–and partnerships with EarthLink, Google, Motorola, IBM, and others. Given its recent contracts, the company is well ahead of competing equipment makers. Yet Tropos faces some difficult tests before it can realize its vision. The new, large-scale projects in San Francisco and Philadelphia will get the technology out of dress rehearsal and in front of a major audience. These launches will be key to the company’s fate. As hundreds of other cities look on, contemplating whether to install their own cheap broadband, and as a phalanx of massive data carriers like Verizon and Comcast glower over what may be a new threat, Tropos will march out onstage. Says CEO Ron Sege: “The best thing we can do is make sure the big cities do well, for everyone to say, ‘Oh, my God, it works.” “What Stops the Internet From Being Everywhere?” In San Francisco, there is a new café every year that has “the best coffee in town.” At the moment, it’s Ritual, a chic place in the Mission District with leather couches, wireless Internet, and PowerBooks on every table. The two founding engineers of Tropos–Narasimha Chari, who goes by “Chari,” and Devabhaktuni “Sri” Srikrishna–are sitting at a small table, drinking lattes and reflecting on recent news. About a year ago, the mayor of San Francisco put out a request for proposals, looking for the optimum plan for “unwiring” the city–that is, for creating a citywide Wi-Fi network. Just the day before, out of a half-dozen contenders, the selection had been announced–and Sri and Chari’s list of big wins had gotten one municipal contract longer. But the two men, both 32, scarcely stopped to rest. That’s because each successive contract brings them closer to answering a question that’s intrigued them since they met as undergraduates at Caltech about 15 years ago: “What stops the Internet from being everywhere?” The magic of the box occurs when you mount it on a lamppost. Install 30 of them per square mile, and you’ve created a wireless network that can transmit data all over a city. The inquiry arose out of mutual concerns about India and other developing countries. As a brainy boy growing up in Calcutta, Chari would take long excursions through the city searching for textbooks containing just the kind of math and science materials you can download in seconds today from the Internet; he knew that connecting people in poor and remote regions could be a profound form of change. Sri, for his part, had a deep desire to be useful and an appetite for solving engineering problems. So while attending graduate school in the late 1990s (Sri at MIT, Chari at Harvard), the two men would hang out in the bars around Cambridge and talk about how to get the Internet everywhere on the planet. The intellectual challenge soon became as enticing as the moral one. It was a problem of cost efficiency: How could you bring the power of computer networks to villages hundreds of miles from the nearest cable TV, places where people can’t even afford phones? It was a technical problem, of bouncing signals around in the air over large areas and then back to the nearest data wires. And finally it was a problem of overcoming natural physical limitations: the distance transmitted signals could travel, for one, and the amount of stuff that can be sent simultaneously. “It’s just a very fascinating subject,” says Sri. “We never really set out to start a company.” Any solution had to be dirt cheap. Even in the United States, broadband is so expensive, both to provide and to purchase, that its growth has not kept up with consumer appetites. Today many rural areas around the country have no high-speed data services, simply because it costs so much to dig up the streets and lay wire. Jupiter Research, a market research firm, estimates that 35 percent of Internet users in exurban or rural areas can get only dial-up connections. In some cases, the necessary conduits reach town, but jackhammering the last bit of pavement to serve a smattering of houses is more of a burden than it’s worth. “There are some places where the economics are prohibitively expensive,” says Brian Blevins, a Verizon spokesperson. For Chari and Sri, the alternative to digging would have to be radio, and while drinking beer and poring over dense technical books, they came across a radio technology developed in the 1970s for military uses. The technology worked on battlefields, but its inventors and the engineers who came after assumed that it wouldn’t scale. Sri and Chari thought otherwise. They suspected that if you could program the nodes of these radio networks cleverly enough, teaching them to move information around quickly, you could make the network as big as you wanted. Their idea was a variation on the principle of the bucket brigade or steppingstones. If you can’t get the signal to reach all the way to the wired Internet, make it hop from one transmitter to another until it does. And give it some basic rules for finding the most efficient pathway there. Here at Ritual, for instance, e-mail data comes in over wires to a base station or router somewhere in the room and then heads through the air to the nearby laptop. Everyone in the café is just one hop from the wired Net. This configuration requires every user to be within about 100 feet of the device that’s plugged in, and it’s why wireless broadband is generally limited to offices and cafés. But what if you told that router to select another router for passing along its message, and told that router to select yet another after that? If you taught those routers to make efficient choices that wouldn’t require arduous processing, eventually the Internet would spill out into the streets. Sri and Chari got hold of some Wi-Fi gear–a cheap type of radio technology recently introduced to the enterprise market for office environments–and started playing with their routing ideas. They mounted antennas on cars and tooled around Cambridge, testing the performance of nodes programmed to obey their new steppingstone rules. “When we started doing this,” Chari says, “people laughed at us, saying Wi-Fi is an indoor technology. But our approach has always been, don’t take anyone’s word for it.” The two men soon realized that they were no longer solving a math problem: They were developing a product. So they picked up and left Boston for northern California. They hooked up with two friends of friends who understood finance and formed a company. It was not a particularly opportune time. “In 2001, we were out there looking for funding. It was awful,” says Chari. But Bill Gurley, whose firm, Benchmark Capital, invested early in companies such as eBay and Red Hat, liked their ideas. “I don’t think anyone at that time was thinking about municipal wireless,” Gurley recalls. “But what was keeping Wi-Fi from going outside?” Even in the united states, More than a third of Internet users in exurban or rural areas can get only dial-up connections. Well, nothing. In the United States, most towns already own the infrastructure for suspending 14-pound boxes in the sky: lampposts, traffic lights, telephone poles, city buildings. The Tropos routers themselves cost only about $3,500 each. So with 30 per square mile installed in a city like San Francisco, you’d spend about $5 million on boxes to serve more than 700,000 citizens. According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, building a fiber network costs $2,000 “per home passed,” in the industry’s argot; providing DSL costs a few hundred dollars. Compare both with Philadelphia’s estimate that the cost per home passed of its Wi-Fi network will be $30. On the user end of the equation, the hardware economics look even better. The Wi-Fi cards that early adopters were sliding into their laptops in 1999 went for about $2,000 apiece. Today the devices are preloaded into nearly all new computers and cost less than $10 each. Right now, as Chari and Sri drain their lattes at Ritual, there are an estimated 50 million Wi-Fi-ready computers out there. So Bill Gurley got onboard. He liked the open standards of Wi-Fi technology and how quickly the price on the user’s side was dropping. He loved Chari and Sri’s vision of teaching routers with limited range and capacity how to build bucket brigades and choose the most promising pathways, based on the condition of the network. “It’s very elegant,” Gurley says. He also liked the growth potential of the market and the focus on software. “As a venture capitalist, I love everything about the Tropos model,” he says. In January 2002, Benchmark Capital ponied up $2.2 million for the young company to work with. Other VC firms followed, including the Intel Communications Fund and Siemens Venture Capital. And so did Ron Sege. Good Enough Beats Best Ron Sege (pronounced seh-gee) is a tall stick of a guy with blue eyes and blond eyelashes, whose elaborately stitched jeans were meant for a younger man. At 49, he is on his second wife, his second batch of kids, and the fourth small company he intends to make large. In a sense, Sege is a Web 2.0 guy all around, bringing hard-earned experience to a young company with a still-unproven business model. As he puts it, “I’ve seen this movie before.” Sege began working in technology in the 1980s, but really hit his stride in the ’90s, as a manager at 3Com, the company that spawned Ethernet technology. 3Com had a few hundred employees when he perspective, good enough beats best,” he says. Ethernet, the protocol that allows office PCs to share databases and printers and storage in a small local network, was far from perfect. “But it was inexpensive, easy to use, and anybody could design to it.” Sege learned the beauty of this approach to business–float a quick and dirty product, let users and other product developers improve on it, and push it as a dominant shared platform. “Wi-Fi has many of the same attributes,” he says. After 3Com, Sege took a job as executive vice president of Lycos, one of the first Internet portals, where he helped engineer an Internet-bubble buying spree that included acquisitions of Matchmaker.com, Quote.com, and Wired Digital. “That was my media mogul period,” Sege says with a laugh. He left Lycos in 2001 and joined Ellacoya Networks, a company based in Merrimack, New Hampshire, that creates software to help broadband providers ease congestion in their networks. Bill Gurley, tipped off by a Benchmark partner who’d worked with Sege in the past, saw in the Ellacoya CEO someone who’d ridden small companies through significant growth and who understood a good deal about data networks. He contacted Sege and told him about Tropos. The company made sense to Sege. Taking off-the-shelf indoor base stations and sticking them up on power poles–that was a formula he understood. Sri and Chari had already come up with the tricks, the proprietary algorithms for handling data traffic and monitoring the system from one main PC, which would set Tropos apart from its direct competitors. (The company has 30 software patents and patents pending.) In 2004, Sege came onboard–”to do all the stuff not involved with writing software.” At first, that meant selling Tropos boxes and software to a small but eager market the start-up had identified: police and fire departments. After September 11, the consequences of poor emergency communications became painfully clear to city leaders nationwide, and many municipalities were attempting to do something about it. What few civilians realize is that their heroes with hoses and their men and women in blue have always relied on only one of their senses for passing information: their ears. They use the same two-way radio technology today that police departments adopted in the 1930s. Some forces have introduced computers into their cruisers for searching DMV or criminal databases, but these hookups are as slow as your first dial-up modem. Forget about downloading a mug shot. Maps, surveillance videos, traffic updates, real-time messaging? Impossible. What emergency responders need is broadband. And it has to be broadband that’s everywhere, broadband that moves. Tropos could deliver that. Sege traveled the country, giving presentations to police and fire departments, steadily signing up customers. Oklahoma City bought Tropos technology to build a network for its police department covering 620 square miles. In Milpitas, California, about 10 miles from the Tropos headquarters, a 40-node Tropos mesh allows police to look up DMV photos and monitor video surveillance of high-crime areas. So Sege and his team were surprised in the spring of 2004 when they got an order from Chaska, Minnesota, a Twin Cities suburb that wasn’t looking to serve its police force. The town’s city council wanted cheaper connectivity–for all of its residents, who were stuck paying $45 per month for high-speed access from Sprint and Time-Warner Cable. The goal was to provide broadband access for all of its citizens for no more than $20 a month. “Tropos was selling a system for public safety departments. Our IT guys thought, ‘Why couldn’t you do 3,000 connections instead of 300?” says Chaska’s city administrator, Dave Pokorney. For Tropos, this was exhilarating. Chaska had come up with this plan on its own, with no help from Tropos, which was focusing its efforts on public safety. The company had helped create networks designed to serve the general public, but only in parks or other circumscribed areas. Chaska was out ahead of them–and within three months, the city had a real-life metroscale network available to anyone in town. Sleeping Giants Everyone at Tropos agrees on what made the company take off. It happened in August of 2004, when Philadelphia, the largest municipality to date to do so, announced plans to blanket the city with Wi-Fi. The idea was to deliver cheap, and possibly free, broadband Internet access to the 1.5 million souls–digital haves and have-nots alike–who lived within the city’s 135 square miles. This was a bold, pioneering step, lauded by civic groups and techies around the country. But the news hit one party particularly hard: Verizon. At the time, the vast majority of Philadelphians who wanted fast connections to the Web had been coming to Verizon for DSL. Now the company would have a new competitor. The proverbial sleeping giant was caught off guard. It’s one thing to build a wireless network for 8,000 households in the suburbs of Minnesota. But it’s something else entirely to do so in one of the nation’s biggest metros. Verizon’s lobbyists marched straight to state lawmakers in Harrisburg and demanded action. And they got it. A telecommunications bill that had been lingering around the capital for more than a year suddenly came up for a vote, and it had a brand-new provision attached to it. The measure said that Pennsylvania cities intending to create high-speed data networks must give the dominant local phone company the right to build first. If the incumbent proceeded within 14 months, the city would be required to drop its plans. For the leaders of Philadelphia, that meant doing nothing for more than a year before getting their project under way. It also meant that cheaper service–some subsidized for the poor–would happen only at the whim of Verizon. But the prospect of an Internet cloud floating through every park and into the city’s overlooked neighborhoods had already intrigued many Philadelphians, and the state legislature’s intervention galvanized people to protect the idea. “The school district, the nonprofits that wanted to serve poor neighborhoods, even our tourism organizations saw the potential,” says Dianah Neff, Philadelphia’s chief information officer and a 14-year veteran of Silicon Valley businesses. “When the legislation came up, we put the pressure on. We had 3,000 people call, write, and e-mail the governor.” Tropos, which already had been tapped to install two pilot projects in public parks, watched the events unfold. Sege hired a Washington lobbying firm, which showed up in Harrisburg, attempting to sway leaders to spare local governments from restrictions. In late November 2004, just as the bill was approved, Philly’s Wi-Fi enthusiasts got a break. “It was almost like diving to get the catch in the end zone,” says Sege. The state agreed to exempt Philadelphia from the requirements. (All other Pennsylvania municipalities remain bound by it.) The way Sege sees it, Verizon’s in-your-face tactics were the best thing that had ever happened to the start-up. The giant telecom’s reaction made dozens of other cities take notice. If Verizon was so ruffled, people seemed to think, then Philadelphia must have been on to something interesting; the technology’s potential must be real. “The phone was ringing off the hook,” says Sege. Cities around the country, from Minneapolis to Tempe, Arizona, began announcing plans for wireless networks. Several months later, the technology was validated by another waking giant when Cisco announced it would begin building routers for muni Wi-Fi. Tropos sales went from 90 municipal clients in all of 2004 to 75 in just the first half of 2005. The next step in the Philadelphia project was to respond to the city’s RFP, and Tropos now had to get down to details. The company had the gear and the software for monitoring and troubleshooting the network, but there was a lot the small company was lacking. Customer service for one thing. And billing. And consumer sales. Rather than build those capabilities in-house, Sege began searching for an established Internet service provider with which to partner. EarthLink fit the bill. The ISP, based in Atlanta, had thrived as a middleman, buying wholesale dial tone, wrapping it up in an attractive brand, and selling it to Internet surfers. But as the world shifted to faster wires and fiber optics, EarthLink had little to offer. Unlike the phone companies, it owned no connections into the home. In January 2005, Bill Gurley paid a visit to EarthLink’s board of directors. He presented his case for a partnership, in which Tropos would provide infrastructure–the actual broadband network–and EarthLink would handle customer support and sales. In response to Gurley’s presentation, EarthLink sent a team to visit Chaska to see for themselves if the new technology worked. The group toured the town and climbed under tables testing the network’s reliability. They interviewed folks in bars. And they were sold on it. “Municipal Wi-Fi is really important for us,” says Donald Berryman, EarthLink’s president of municipal networks. “It’s one of the top three investments we’re making in future products. It can help us control our destiny because we’ll own the network.” Tropos and EarthLink have since landed deals with five cities and have proposals out to five more. But Will It Really Work? Not surprisingly, the Bells and other data-access providers haven’t backed down. Since the maneuver in Pennsylvania, giants like BellSouth and Comcast have fueled a fight against muni Wi-Fi across the country. Lawmakers in Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, and Oregon, among others, have proposed legislation to keep local governments from building their own networks or at least make it more difficult for them to do so. Fourteen states, including Florida and Colorado, have already passed restrictions. “We have not supported a ban on municipal networks,” says Verizon’s Brian Blevins. “But we’ve felt where there’s vibrant competition, the networks can undercut and disrupt a market that’s working very well.” Critics of muni Wi-Fi argue that if local governments participate in building broadband networks, they’ll exploit unfair tax and regulatory advantages, irresponsibly drain public coffers, and mismanage the services. To counter the legislative gambit, Sege and others have taken to evangelizing in Washington, D.C., and state capitals. They’ve made some progress. In June 2005, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced a federal bill in answer to the activity in the states. The Community Broadband Act of 2005, still in committee, would “preserve and protect the ability of local governments to provide broadband capability and services.” Says one Lautenberg staffer: “The senator doesn’t think there should be obstacles–we’re 16th in the world in terms of broadband penetration.” A bill awaiting a vote by the House, on the other hand, would create barriers–for instance, requiring cities to partner with a private company. A restriction like that, though seemingly innocuous, would have prevented Chaska from building its network. These policy struggles are not the only hurdles Tropos is facing as it lunges for profitability in 2007. There are big technical questions. It’s one thing to build a wireless network for 8,000 households in the suburbs of Minnesota. But it’s something else entirely to do so in one of the nation’s biggest metros. “Nobody’s demonstrated that you can have 135 miles of Wi-Fi,” says Julie Ask, a research director at Jupiter Research. Radio signal is notoriously unpredictable. When your cell phone drops out every time you round the corner of Elm Street, that’s because the mobile provider didn’t predict a problem there. Home devices from cordless phones to baby monitors might cause interference. Tempe, Arizona, where Tropos competitor Strix Systems provided 500 wireless routers, discovered that signal wasn’t getting through house walls beyond 150 yards from the routers. Many Tempe users found they needed an additional $100 device to receive and send data from indoors. Tropos could face similar problems. Dozens of municipalities have joined in, but there is not much of a record. “As a mayor, why wouldn’t you say, ‘I want to bridge the digital divide’?” says Ask. “EarthLink wants to point to Philadelphia and say, ‘Hey, it works,’ but until there’s proof…” After a city government invests $20 million, no users will be happy if their connections go down or their webpages load slowly. The last thing Tropos needs is for annoyed customers to head back to Verizon. Another looming question is what business models will work. Will consortia like the EarthLink-Tropos team for San Francisco prove easy for cities and profitable for the participating companies? Will the Bells hedge their bets and start offering their own systems? Will cities build their own public Internet utilities, just as many today deliver power without the help of private entities? In any of these scenarios, Tropos’ business doesn’t change. The Bells, the city governments, the ISPs–they’ll all need to buy boxes from someone. As experiments are made and the best models emerge, Sege insists that Tropos will stay relevant. First, of course, he has to deal with Philadelphia, which is building its 15-square-mile test area this summer and plans to roll out the full network in 2007. “I honestly believe that a lot of people are waiting to say, ‘We told you it wouldn’t work,” Sege says. Philadelphia CIO Dianah Neff doesn’t seem to mind that tension. “There’s a lot of pressure on Tropos and EarthLink. But that’s to our benefit because they’re trying really hard,” she says. “It’s like you live in a fishbowl. It’s not just other cities, but the world that’s watching.” Martha Baer is co-author of Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World. This is her first story for Inc.

About 3825 days ago E-Commerce

60-Second Business Plan: Lesson Plans

60-Second Business Plan The pitch: George W. Bush may have coined the phrase “No Child Left Behind,” but Baxter T. Brings intends to make good — and good money — on the pledge. His two-year-old company, Advanced Academics Inc., provides on-line course work for tough-to-teach students: those who are at risk for not graduating, those who live in rural areas, those who are homeschooled, and even those who are overachievers. By 2005, says Brings, 2.9 million students will fall into such categories. That translates into a $19-billion market, given that, on average, states spend $6,584 per public high school student per year, according to the U.S. Department of Education. “Ours is a rapidly growing segment in the K-12 space because it’s new,” says Brings, who serves as Advanced Academics’ president and CEO. “And with the newness comes a lot of opportunity.” The Oklahoma City company offers 60 accredited courses in subjects ranging from Spanish to biology (think virtual-frog dissection) to students in the 12 states with educational policies that are most hospitable to on-line instruction. The company plans to expand to at least 15 more states by 2007. Advanced Academics isn’t alone in the field; Brings cites six on-line learning companies as competitors. What puts Advanced Academics at the head of the class, Brings believes, is its business and revenue models. “A lot of private companies compete with the public-education market, and that’s the opposite of what we do,” he says. “We supplement what the public-education market is doing.” To that end, the company, with its 52 employees, forms partnerships with school districts, which largely determine the contracts’ terms, including how many students will participate and which courses will be offered. The company’s fee ($335 per student per course) comes out of the average daily attendance funding that states allocate to their school districts (an average of $500 per student per course). The $165 difference between what the districts take in and what they dish out to Advanced Academics goes straight to the schools’ coffers. The system is designed to appeal to administrators. Though Advanced Academics develops all the courses itself, students log on to Web sites that frequently bear the district’s name. Also, curricula can be customized to meet district standards. And the system monitors students automatically, which allows teachers, schools, and parents to keep track of what their pupils are studying in real time. Brings also provides students with 24-7 access to a team of Advanced Academics instructors — 20 teachers and 7 teaching assistants — by means of live chat, E-mail, and phone. True, the student-teacher ratio of 250 to 1 is no improvement over Any Town High, but Brings insists it’s vastly superior. “We don’t teach a class, we teach a student,” he asserts. “Because it’s round-the-clock, we actually touch the kids more than kids are touched in the classroom.” BUSINESS CLASS: Baxter T. Brings’s company is working with schools to post course work on-line.

About 3978 days ago Telecom and Wireless

IM Is Here. RU Ready 2 Try It?

Special Technology Report In the late 1980s, Rhonda Sanderson happily moved her tiny public-relations agency from downtown Chicago to suburban Highland Park. The move cut her commute from 30 minutes to about 30 seconds: she’d set up shop in an office building across the street from her home. But a decade later, Sanderson & Associates Ltd. was growing, and Sanderson found that the top job candidates — recent college grads — viewed her location as a distinct drawback. Having just escaped from smallish midwestern college communities, they weren’t interested in launching their careers somewhere even smaller. “They wanted to live and work in the big city,” says Sanderson. Sanderson, a single parent, didn’t want to uproot her high school-age daughter to move back downtown. Instead, she bought a small building in a trendy Chicago neighborhood and moved several of her employees there. After she had satisfied everyone’s lifestyle demands, Sanderson had just one nagging concern: how would she, the suburban CEO who schlepped into the city just two days a week, stay in the loop the rest of the time? “I thought, ‘Will I have to call them every single minute?’ ” she says. As it turns out, Sanderson does talk with her seven staffers dozens of times daily — but without picking up the phone. Instead they chat live on-line, using a free instant-messaging (IM) program installed by an employee. Today “it’s fair to say we run the whole business on IM,” says Sanderson, whose company, with revenues in excess of $1 million, specializes in representing national franchises such as Meineke Discount Mufflers and Back Yard Burgers. “Every [internal] communication is by IM. Everything. This arrangement wouldn’t have worked without it.” There’s no playing phone tag, no wondering whether somebody got that urgent E-mail message, no delaying a response to a crisis. Sanderson is never more than a few keystrokes from her Chicago employees — as long as everyone is near a computer. “I feel much more secure handling my office this way,” she says of the constant real-time contact. “I feel the need to be connected to them.” CEOs nationwide are discovering what teenagers and twentysomethings, including Sanderson’s daughter and staffers, have known for years: IM is an addictively fast, simple, and cheap way to communicate. There’s nothing exotic about the technology. It’s basically real-time E-mail, either in-house or over the Internet. But unlike E-mail, IM is, well, instantaneous; as soon as the message writer hits “send,” the message pops up on the receiver’s screen. And unlike E-mail, IM doesn’t generate in-box clutter. Conversations usually vanish when they’re finished (although programs increasingly allow one to save them), and users, because they control their lists of authorized contacts, are less likely to receive “spam,” or unsolicited messages. The best-known IM programs are free; even commercial products are relatively cheap. Although an IM conversation typically involves just two people, power users may conduct several conversations simultaneously or create a chat room where any number of users can join the discussion. With some programs, users can even swap graphics, video clips, or voice clips. And unlike any other form of communication, IM monitors physical presence. With a glance at their contact lists, users can tell who’s logged on and available right now. Even though IM began as a way for kids to pass notes electronically (see “The IM Generation,” below), it’s clearly becoming a vital tool in businesses. IDC, a research company based in Framingham, Mass., says that about 40% of U.S. companies already use the technology. Jupiter Media Metrix, headquartered in New York City, says nearly 17 million Americans used the largest free IM services at work in March 2002, up from 10 million in September 2000. Gartner Inc., in Stamford, Conn., calls IM “the sleeping giant of the Internet” and predicts that by next year employees at 70% of all companies will use IM for business or personal communication. By 2005, Gartner says, at least 50% of U.S. businesses will rely on IM to interact with customers — and most consumers will use IM more frequently than they use E-mail. Naturally, IM works best in businesses in which employees are tethered to computers. Large high-tech and telecom companies like IBM and AT&T have used the technology for years. But it’s picking up speed in less likely industries. For instance, manufacturers are beginning to use IM kiosks in factories to keep managers in close contact with floor supervisors. Retailers that have been using live chat on their Web sites for the past few years are beginning to use it in-house as well. Jennifer Convertibles in Woodbury, N.Y., uses IM to communicate with managers in its 200-plus stores nationwide. Rami Abada, the chain’s president and chief financial officer, says the low-cost IM network, which replaced a costly voice-mail system, has saved the company $50,000 to $60,000 a year and eliminated 7,000 calls a week that were going into voice mail. Now smaller companies, too, are getting the message that IM is free or cheap, requires no special hardware and no training, and can even be kind of fun. (See “Instant Lingo,” below.) And despite some of IM’s drawbacks — such as legitimate concerns about security and productivity — they’re finding plenty of ways to use it. For many growing companies, IM’s main appeal is simply being able to reach anybody instantly — even when both parties are already busy. Being there: In the Chicago office of Sanderson & Associates on a hectic Friday morning in April, Kelly Templer was on the phone with a reporter. She checked her contact list to be sure Sanderson was on-line. She was. Templer opened her IM on-screen window and typed in: “I have a reporter from AP on the phone. I want him to interview Tommy about IFE [a franchise trade show], he also wants other franchise info — what should I do?” She hit “send,” and Sanderson, on another call in the Highland Park office, saw the message pop up. Sanderson immediately shot back: “Give it to him! Offer him interview with Don DeBolt or some other expert if he wants independent source. Try to get info on exhibitors to him.” Neither had skipped a beat on their respective phone calls. Bolstering virtual management: At Tax Technologies Inc., a two-year-old tax-preparation and software company, vice-president Jeff Wenger, who’s based in Bradenton, Fla., uses IM to manage a team of software developers and testers scattered all over the United States. Because all IM programs indicate which users are logged on, Wenger can tell, for instance, when developer Anar Patel, in Warren, Ohio, is available and when Adrienne Morey, in Phoenix, is on-line. (Team members can, and do, converse with one another by IM all day — and sometimes all night — about work in progress.) Wenger says the setup allows him to hire top employees who can work and live wherever they want, “whether it’s the mountains of Colorado, the beaches of Florida, or the big city.” Using IM has cut his daily telephone time from three hours to less than 30 minutes. Other organizations rely on IM to stay in touch with telecommuters, road warriors, or local field staff. Companies that have overseas employees, partners, or customers may find the technology particularly cost-effective. Managing crises: AtomicPR, a $1.9-million San Francisco high-tech PR agency that was launched in late 1999, just before the dot-com bubble burst, built real-time communications into its business model and culture. The company’s 15 employees say that IM provides them with a competitive advantage in a tough economy. Today the business uses IM for both in-house and client communications, and the staffers have found it invaluable for responding rapidly to a crisis. In one case, account supervisor Mike Crusick contacted company cofounder Andy Getsey by IM at 7 a.m. on a weekday, when both were still at home, to report some bad news: a press release had just come over the wire that a client was being sued by a competitor. Andy to Mike: Wow. I’ll do a quick plan for [client], then give her a call. It’d be best to have recent real-world examples too. Can you find a few similar suits and corporate responses ASAP? Thx. Mike: Here are links to announcements/responses in similar suit. Andy: Thx. Can you find 2 more from different suits, too? Hurry. Andy: PS. Would you call the rest of your team and let them know what’s happening ASAP? Andy: PSS. And tell team to hold on related media communications until we talk to [client]. Mike: Of course. Mike: More links to difft suits. Andy: Check Andy: Just emailed [client] 5 point plan. CC’d you and team. Calling her now. Mike: Roger that. Andy: Just talked with [client]. Buzzing there! Went over the key points and examples. She’s going into internal meeting at 9 — will call us immediately after. Thx for help. I’ll be at office in an hour or so. Mike: Great. I’m headed into the office now. See you there. Busy morning already Instant inventory tracking: At Pacific International Marketing, a produce-trading company in Salinas, Calif., with revenues under $100 million, sales managers use IM to simultaneously alert 35 salespeople in five cities to market changes. A typical message: “Stop selling broccoli at $7; it’s dropped to $6.” That’s a big improvement over the decidedly low-tech tradition of simply yelling across the room to local traders and then calling around to remote offices to spread the news. And, says president Tom Russell, the time savings is no small potatoes in his industry, where prices can fluctuate 100% in 24 hours and product shelf life is measured in days. As Russell puts it, “The minute we cut some product in the field, it’s beginning its journey to the Dumpster.” He estimates that IM has saved him thousands of dollars in phone calls — and an untold amount in losses caused by information delays. Kibitizing on transactions: One of IM’s most practical and widespread uses in small companies is allowing behind-the-scenes collaboration. At $22-million YellowPages.com, an on-line ad directory based in Henderson, Nev., the company’s 42 employees “ping,” or contact one another by IM, throughout the day. “My Chicago guy is pinging me right now,” Dennis Warren, senior vice-president of corporate development, says during a telephone interview. (His reply: “OTP. SB.” Translation: “On the phone. Stand by, I’ll get right back to you.”) But the technology’s real value, he says, is in letting salespeople get the answers they need. For instance, a rep who is trying to close a deal on the phone might use IM with Warren: “Can I offer her a 30% discount?” Warren can decide and reply on the spot (“Yes,” or “Try 15% first”) without making the employee — or the potential customer — wait. At StudentUniverse, a travel service in Watertown, Mass., that caters to college-age customers, agents often use IM to send questions to a manager, aiming to get an immediate response without putting the customer on hold. Customer-service director Phil Dobbyn credits IM for helping cut his staff’s average time per call by 25% in just a few months. Finacorp Securities, a bond brokerage in Newport Beach, Calif., with revenues under $5 million, uses IM for everything from telecommuting to providing tech support for its on-line arm, Tradebonds.com. But IM’s greatest value is linking salespeople to the firm’s compliance officers to get fast answers to regulatory questions. Some managers own up to swapping messages with one another during conference calls with outsiders. StudentUniverse CEO Espen Odegard occasionally uses IM to confer with his cofounder or his lawyer during sticky negotiations. Other executives cue each other during calls; in fact, AtomicPR senior account manager Misha Gulak used IM with Getsey during a phone interview with Inc, reminding Getsey about a point she thought he should make. Instant gratification, of course, comes with a price. For starters, IM, like E-mail, can transmit viruses that existing security software may not detect. (For that reason, security experts recommend using virus-scanning programs that specifically cover IM.) But because anybody can download free IM software from the Web, tech staffers may not even realize employees are using it. And IM isn’t always secure, as the CEO of a now-defunct California dot-com learned when he found copies of his private messages posted on the Web. In May, Microsoft warned that its popular free IM program, MSN Messenger, contained a serious security flaw that could leave users vulnerable to computer hackers. (The company provided a free on-line “patch” to fix the problem.) With that in mind, Tax Technologies instructs users not to transmit confidential client information. StudentUniverse’s messages include their own version of the surgeon general’s warning: “Never give out your password or credit-card number in an instant message conversation.” Obviously, any new link to the outside creates new opportunities to leak corporate secrets. For that reason, IM programs increasingly include monitoring functions that allow companies to capture or log transmissions. Many IM programs — particularly the free ones — won’t work with one another, meaning that if you have only Yahoo Messenger, you can’t use IM to communicate with a client who has only AOL Instant Messenger. That’s exactly why the American Homeowners Foundation, a publishing and lobbying organization based in Arlington, Va., stopped using IM last year. Initially, the foundation’s directors hoped to use the technology to quickly correspond with the far-flung authors who write the organization’s books. But they ultimately found IM more frustrating than useful, says vice-president Chris Christensen, citing the plethora of incompatible programs. Michael Osterman, an electronic-messaging consultant in Black Diamond, Wash., predicts that the industry will adopt a common standard within the next year or two. In addition, some people find the barrage of read-me-right-now messages annoying or disruptive. “Your attention gets very fragmented. It gets in the way of good solid thinking,” says Carl Stormer, StudentUniverse’s cofounder and executive vice-president. “It’s almost like white noise; you don’t notice it till it’s gone.” Other executives occasionally shut off IM or change their status to “busy” or “do not disturb.” Managers at some companies worry that employees will spend too much work time using IM to chat with pals inside and outside the company. Others — such as StudentUniverse’s Norwegian-born Odegard and Stormer, who use IM daily to correspond with their families in Norway — view it as a perk they can offer employees, as long as personal use doesn’t get out of control. They also emphasize that IM isn’t the right tool for every business missive; employees should still turn to E-mail when they need a record and to the phone for the personal touch. Finally, they acknowledge that IM sometimes provides solutions to problems that don’t exist. For instance, employees at StudentUniverse admit that they sometimes swap messages with nearby coworkers rather than step next door or down the hall. Stormer says, “That is like taking the elevator to the first floor.” Yet even critics recognize the technology’s promise. For example, ActiveBuddy, a New York City developer of IM products, offers free homework help, stock quotes, and sports scores; the company also created IM promotions for the band Radiohead, teen singer Lindsay Pagano, and the movie The Lord of the Rings. Other companies are exploring IM’s potential for real-time auctions, travel booking, technical support, and stock trading. Meanwhile, the earliest adopters remain true believers in the technology’s value. “Our development team is 5 to 10 times more productive in our virtual environment than in a traditional office setting,” says Tax Technologies’ Wenger. “It’s disruptive,” says Dane Madsen, CEO of YellowPages.com. “But so was the Internet and so was E-mail. You adjust.” Anne Stuart is a senior writer at Inc. Instant Lingo In instant-messaging culture, spelling and grammar matter less than trading messages at the speed of a championship tennis match. So fans of IM write in standard business shorthand: FYI, ASAP, OK, thx, cc. They also rely on those annoying acronyms that hard-core E-mailers have thrown around for years: BTW (by the way), LOL (laughing out loud), TTFN (ta-ta for now). But as if it weren’t telegraphic enough, business IM seems to be adapting its own code. Among the ones we found: BRB: Be right back. BTN/5: Be there in five (minutes); be right there. C&B or c/b: Crash and burn. Convo: Conversation. G2G: Got to go. IC: I see. JK or j/k: Just kidding. JW or j/w: Just wondering. NP or n/p: No problem. OTL: Out to lunch. OTP: On the phone. OTR: On the road. Ping: To send someone an instant message (“I’ll ping you later”). Pop: Ditto. SB: Stand by (as in “just a minute”). SN: Screen name, or on-line identity. TTYL: Talk to you later. The IM Generation Most youthful IM aficionados use the technology for exactly the reason you’d expect: to converse, instantly, with everybody they know. Simultaneously. “I have 11 windows open,” Jessica Nurnberg, 15, of Oklahoma City, typed during an interview using IM. Translation: As Nurnberg answered Inc‘s questions at lightning speed, she was chatting with 10 other friends, swapping messages on everything from homework to hot ninth-grade gossip. Other young IM fans cite more practical uses, such as: Passive promotion. Kevin Colleran, 21, wouldn’t dream of spamming his 200 IM buddies with ads for his on-line business, Clubvibes.com Boston, a nightclub directory. But Colleran, a Babson College senior who holds several national “young entrepreneur” titles, uses the Clubvibes logo in his buddy icon (the on-line ID badge that appears during IM sessions). That way, he raises brand awareness without raising hackles. Real-time brainstorming. For a sociology class, Marie Aschenbrenner, 18, of Penticton, British Columbia, was assigned to a debate team taking a “pro” stance on globalization. Team members researched the issue, then met on-line the night before the debate. Working into the wee hours, they drafted and rehearsed their arguments — entirely by IM. Coordination of schedules. Emily Giles, 15, of East Greenwich, R.I., uses IM to quickly organize gatherings. “U can ask a bunch of people if they can do the same thing all @ the same time,” she wrote in standard IM (rather than standard English) during an IM interview. “Its easier 2 keep track of who can do what n who cant.” Homework help. Casey Koppelson, 17, of Newport, R.I., sometimes uses IM for French-class assignments. If Koppelson needs the French phrase for “mow the lawn,” she sends an IM inquiry to SmarterChild, a free on-line homework helper. SmarterChild instantly searches its database of information and sends back a message with the words: “fauchez la pelouse.” Matchmaking. Sarah Kornblum, 16, of Natick, Mass., uses IM to introduce friends from different towns. “They chat on here for a while and get to know each other a little bit and THEN go out on a date,” she wrote. “So far it is working pretty well, if I do say so myself.” Many under age 25 can’t imagine life without IM. “I really don’t know what I did before,” says Aschenbrenner, who had never used IM before she started college last September. Now she’s so IM-dependent that when she stayed off-line for a whole day, her brother called to check on her. Please E-mail your comments to editors@inc.com. Related content: IM Product Sampler IM Legal Primer IM Etiquette

About 4585 days ago Business Software

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 one-time 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. Copyright © 2000 G+J USA Publishing

About 4585 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.