Location, Location, Location
Here's a nightmare scenario: You're far from home, lost, and driving through some mountain range on a snowy winter night when suddenly your car dies. Fortunately, you have your trusty cellular phone with you. But when you call 911 for help, you realize that you can't tell the dispatcher where you are--and that it could take him anywhere from five minutes to five days to trace your cellular signal.
Too bad you don't have FoneFinder with you. Developed by patent attorney Bob Tendler, chairman of Tendler Cellular, in Boston (800-896-4440), the miniature system, which can be integrated into just about any cellular phone, combines global-positioning-system (GPS) tracking technology with a voice-synthesis chip. All a caller has to do is push a special panic button mounted on the cell phone. The device automatically dials the nearest 911 service, and the synthesized voice announces its exact location. If all goes smoothly, says Tendler, cell-phone manufacturer Audiovox will have the system in its Model 405 come September. --Joshua Macht
Free at Last
Signing up for an on-line newsletter or updates from your favorite newsgroup is easy. You enter your E-mail address on the dotted line and never think about it again--that is, until you want to discontinue the service. Then it seems as if only a presidential pardon could stop the daily onslaught of messages you face.
One option to check out is Cancel-it (www.cancel-it.com), a free on-line consumer service that can help you rid your life of unwanted E-mail and pesky dial-up Internet accounts and other on-line subscriptions that you've been trying to shake since the day you signed on. Just fill out the proper form at the Cancel-it site, and within 24 hours the service will kick into gear. A week or so later you should be free.
The site's inventor, Phillip Underhill, believes he's performing a service not only for consumers but for large companies like America Online and Microsoft as well. "We're finding out about what customers don't like on-line, and that's important information for companies to have," says Underhill, founder of Dot Com Interactive, an electronic-marketing firm based in New York City. "And, of course, it's good customer service to make it easy to quit something." --J.M.
Growth areas on the Internet, and expected rate of increase in next two years
Training and/or continuing education 272%Direct sales to customers 260%Electronic publishing 189%Telecommuting 171%
Source: 1997 American Management Association survey of 3,500 executives and 700 systems and administrative managers.
Things We Love
As director of international sales for Systems Computer Supplies, a $40-million computer-supply store in Miami, Octavio Rios receives hundreds of computer accessories a week to sample. Recently, one called out to him: the WorldTalk Internet Phone, from InterAct Multimedia Products ($49.99; 410-238-2424; www.interact-acc.com).
The plastic phone, which comes bundled with Microsoft's NetMeeting and Internet Explorer, looks like an ordinary phone with no dial pad; it hooks into your computer instead of a wall jack. To make a call, you enter an E-mail address in a box on the screen. The recipient of your E-mail, who must also have Internet telephony software and either a computer microphone or the WorldTalk phone, gets a screen message about the call. Then you talk--you through the WorldTalk phone, and the recipient through the WorldTalk phone or the mike.
Rios initially purchased the phone just for fun. But after using it to talk to some of his clients in South America, he decided he should use it for business--and carry it in his store. "I realized I could be facing a hell of a savings on international calls," says Rios, who adds that he rings up nearly $18,000 a month in overseas telephone charges. "It's a beautiful piece of equipment. I hope they don't regulate it." --Sarah Schafer
A River Runs Through IT
GRAND FORKS, N. DAK.--When the Red River recently overflowed its banks and flooded Grand Forks, N. Dak., it displaced more than 50,000 residents and devastated virtually every small business in the downtown area. But at least one longtime Grand Forks business owner was able to keep Mother Nature from crippling his company--primarily because he'd decided to automate seven years earlier.
Howard Palay's lived in Grand Forks all his life. His 16-employee company, Palay Display Industries Inc., sells retail fixtures and supplies--everything from candy racks to mannequins--through a mail-order catalog. The company has occupied the same spot since 1960. Back then, Palay's father, Robert, used paper-based systems to track orders and inventory. Today computers have streamlined the process: customers place orders via 800 numbers that ring in either Grand Forks or a branch office in Minneapolis, a good 320 miles away; operators punch data into computerized customer files; and labels are automatically printed out in a main stockroom.
Once it became clear that Grand Forks would be evacuated, Palay knew what he had to do: load his family and the server holding the company's records into his minivan and hightail it to the office in Minneapolis. That office uses only dumb terminals, connected to the main server in Grand Forks by a 56 KB direct line. For inventory, he would have to rely on a stash of fixtures in Minneapolis. "If the server had gone under, we would have been done," says Palay.
With the shrill whine of air-raid sirens ringing in the Saturday night background, Palay--with his wife, Patti, and their three children--shoved their belongings and the server into the van and drove hastily off to Minneapolis. "It was scarier than heck," he says, adding that the scene brought to mind "London during World War II."
When Palay reached Minneapolis the next day, he spent about four hours rigging the dumb terminals to the server. "It's a pretty big deal for me to run a toaster," he says. Fortunately, he wasn't all alone. Minneapolis-based Saber Systems, Palay's hardware and software supplier, helped him work out the kinks. By 9 o'clock Monday morning, he'd rebuilt the network, and the company was up and running as if nothing had happened.
In fact, Palay may have been too efficient. Few of the company's 5,000 customers thought to place orders. Most just assumed that the small business would be closed for a while. "We worked hard to get everything smoothed out," says Palay. "It's tough, but you just get through it." --J.M.
Jockeying for Position
If you have a Web site, you've probably pondered the mystery of search engines. How do I get on them? How do I get my site to come out high on the list when someone does a search? Should I put "Heaven's Gate" in the text to get more hits?
Before you get carried away with quadratic equations and cult buzzwords, you might want to try a new product called WebPosition Agent (from I.S.T.; $99 to $289; 800-962-4855; www.webposition.com). The program monitors your site's ranking on all the top search engines, including AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo.
Let's say you have a Web site that sells baseball cards. You can type in words like baseball, Babe Ruth, and Dodgers, and the WebPosition software will go out and bring you a detailed report of how your site fared on each engine. You can even set the program to automatically check your site's position--or your competitor's position--daily, weekly, or monthly.
If you discover that your site falls at the bottom of the engines' lists, don't despair. WebPosition Agent offers tips on how to boost your ranking. It might tell you, for example, to use the plural form of words on your site rather than the singular so that people searching under either form--say, card or cards--will pick it up. The folks at I.S.T. also send out a newsletter via E-mail with updates on the best ways to use search engines. --S.S.
Guru Watch
In their new book, Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities (Harvard Business School Press, March 1997, $24.95), John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong, consultants with McKinsey & Co., talk about why virtual communities are important to companies doing business on the Internet. Recently, Hagel discussed the topic with Inc. Technology.
On new business models: Many companies new to the Internet use the same formulas they depend on in the physical world. That may allow them to do things faster, but they miss the real opportunities, such as rethinking how they do business and redefining who their customers are. They should look at going on the Internet as they would look at going into a new country--and exploit the potential unique to the new place. The Motley Fool Financial Forum, an investment group on America Online, has done that well. The two brothers who started the group originally wanted to do a newsletter. But they found, on AOL, that the real power lay in drawing people together to interact and share information. They created an engaging environment by allowing people to discuss all kinds of investment strategies, rather than expecting them to read a static newsletter on-line.
On the benefits of being first: The organizations that are aggressive in building virtual communities first will be difficult to displace because they'll gain assets that are hard to duplicate or steal. For instance, they'll create a loyal membership and have access to its buying patterns and on-line habits. If they collect that information in an organized manner, they can use it to attract advertisers or to tailor their services and products to the group. Even if a competitor comes along later, it won't be able to reproduce those membership profiles. Nor will it be able to inspire the trust that has developed in the original communities.
On clarifying your intent: Those companies that are successful in attracting visitors to their on-line sites are those for whom selling is almost an afterthought. People go where they can get good information. For example, when Chase Manhattan realized that it was one of the largest lenders to recreational-vehicle owners, it set up a Web site that targets the RV market. At its site you can find links to other sites, one of which contains a listing of RV parks around the country and the facilities they offer. Of course, the blurring of advertising and information is a double-edged sword. Companies that put up sites like the Chase Manhattan one run the risk of looking dishonest. On the one hand, companies need to make the on-line experience engaging so that information won't seem dry and irrelevant. On the other hand, they have to make it clear when they're in a promotional or advertising mode.
What prevents executives from using the Internet more often
Too slow 48%Accessibility/lack of knowledge amongcustomers, colleagues, suppliers 29%Security issues 29%Difficult access in general 21%Poor Web-site design 14%
Source: 1997 American Management Association survey of 3,500 executives and 700 systems and administrative managers.
Drop a Dime--and More
When AT&T orders you to "know the code," it's referring to its 800 number for collect calls. But there are codes it would prefer you didn't know--codes that would give you access to cheaper long-distance carriers, even if AT&T is your primary service. "The industry knows a dirty little secret," says Robert Pokress, founder of MediaCom Corp., a manufacturer of PC-based telephony software in Bedford, Mass. "You don't have to be locked into one long-distance company."
Pokress developed the Phone-Miser system so that small companies and individuals (who can't afford to pay someone to worry about phone issues) could take advantage of the peculiar design of the telephone infrastructure--lines piggybacking upon lines--to find the cheapest fare for long-distance calls. The system consists of a software program and a hardware device that plugs into the parallel port of a PC. Each time you dial a long-distance number, Phone-Miser "listens" and routes the call, using special codes to access the cheapest carrier.
Though the product won't be available until July, MediaCom is accepting orders for it at its Web site (www.phonemiser.com). Phone-Miser costs just under $100, but Pokress estimates it could save small businesses more than 50% on their phone bills. --S.S.
Track Record
They said it couldn't be done. But William Robinson, founder of Sovereign Technologies Corp., in Point Pleasant, N.J., may have invented a system that enables your inventory to keep track of itself.
Robinson's PalTrack (908-892-6540; sovtech@injersey.com; www.sovtechcorp.com) uses a global positioning system (GPS) to track products without manual labor or even bar-code scanning.
Here's how it works. Imagine you have a warehouse packed with 300 items. Each item is fitted with a tiny transmitter that emits a unique code. Transceivers scattered around the warehouse pick up the code, and using a variation on GPS that works inside buildings, they track the path of the item each time it's moved. The transceivers then send the information to a central database that uses software developed by Sovereign Technologies to keep a digital log of each item's location.
Buildings aren't the only place PalTrack works. You can install the transceivers in, say, a fleet of trucks to make sure items are delivered on time or to find out if they've been lost or stolen en route.
The price of PalTrack varies, depending largely on the number of transmitters and transceivers used. An average-size warehouse--approximately 100,000 square feet--would probably need 15 transceivers ($380 apiece), one copy of the software ($12,000), and about 500 transmitters ($6 apiece). Now if you could only put the transmitters on your cash to see where that's going. --S.S.
Why people revisit a Web site
Very entertaining 56%Grabs my attention 54%Extremely useful content 53%Information is tailored to my needs 45%Thought provoking 39%Visually appealing 39%Highly interactive 36%Loads quickly 21%
Source: IntelliQuest Web Evaluation Services, 1996
Lost in Space
E-mail might be a cheap way to reach thousands of people with the touch of a keystroke, but it's not always reliable. At least that's what Neodata, a subscription-fulfillment and direct-mail company in Louisville, recently discovered when it tried to E-mail a message to 85,000 names. As of last count, only 17,000 messages were ever delivered.
The problem, according to Mark BoschÉ, Neodata's director of Internet Services, is that E-mail addresses change at an astounding rate, and there is no clearinghouse to track the constant churn. "There's a huge turnover of E-mail addresses right now," says BoschÉ, "and we have no great way of keeping up with it."
Physical mailing addresses, on the other hand, are fairly stable. Plus, the U.S. Post Office sponsors a national change-of-address program. The result: of the 1.9 million pieces of snail mail that leave Neodata's facility each day, fewer than 1% are undelivered. --J.M.