"Incorporating on-line allows people to access information immediately and fill out applications whenever it's convenient," says Sid Garnett, vice-president of American Incorporators Ltd. (www.ailcorp.com), which now serves about 20% of its customers on-line. It's also an economical alternative to using a lawyer. Garnett estimates that legal fees for incorporating a small business in Connecticut might run as high as $1,000. --Robyn Taylor Parets
The Book of Virtuals
Virtual teams are everywhere, argues the new book Virtual Teams (John Wiley & Sons, 1997, $28). To find out more about the expanding use of these once-exotic animals, we asked William R. Pape, cofounder of VeriFone Inc. and the author of Inc. Technology's "Virtual Manager" column, to interview authors Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps--from a distance, of course.
Pape: What's your shorthand definition of a virtual team?
Stamps: Virtual teams cross boundaries--either boundaries of space and time or boundaries of organization. Cross-functional teams are a very early kind of virtual team.
Pape: In the introduction to the book, you say that you "don't go into detail about why people form virtual teams." Could you elaborate on why?
Lipnack: We said that in order to do away with the argument that virtual teams are formed only to do X, Y, and Z. I've had people say to me, "Software -development teams are the only teams that are truly virtual." Well, that's patently ridiculous. Every team that needs to work together and whose members are more than 50 feet apart is a virtual team.
Stamps: People form virtual teams for every reason under the sun: because the technology is available, because they're able to work with people at a distance. The most likely reason is that the expertise they need is not all in the same place.
Pape: Let's discuss the flip side. In what situations do people really need to be in the same place?
Stamps: Situations that require a lot of negotiation. Situations where trust is both required and low. But if you're brainstorming the best way to solve a particular chemical problem, then that's done well on-line.
Lipnack: Nothing compares with bringing people together at the beginning of a project. You can do it on-line, but there's no substitute for the momentum you get from bringing people together with a well-organized agenda and some good social time built into it.
Pape: One of the things we at VeriFone have learned is that having an initial time in which team members get to know one another as individuals dramatically reduces the amount of communication effort required at a distance.
Stamps: On longer-term, larger projects, the best thing to do is figure out early on what the milestones are. Then you get together at those milestones--maybe four or five times over the course of a six-month project. That way you develop a rhythm of coming together and moving apart that's natural to the human condition.
The Wired Sex
Wages may still favor men, but women business owners are way ahead when it comes to taking advantage of the Internet.
|
Women |
Men |
| Subscribe to an on-line service |
47% |
41% |
| Frequently use the Internet to communicate or send E-mail |
51% |
40% |
| Use the Internet for research |
22% |
14% |
| Use the Internet to review business opportunities or bid on contracts |
9% |
3% |
| Have a company home page |
23% |
16% |
Source: National Foundation for Women Business Owners.
Things We Love
Phil Schnyder is an information junkie. President of askSam Systems, a freeform-database company in Perry, Fla., Schnyder makes software that helps customers sort through reams of data, but personally, he can't get enough facts and figures to satisfy his own cravings.
To stay current Schnyder subscribes to more than 20 computer-industry magazines. In the past, when he found a juicy piece of information, Schnyder used to rip out the page and carry it around until he had time to key it into a database or feed it into his optical character recognition (OCR) scanner. Inevitably, some articles would be lost, and the pile awaiting scanning would grow depressingly high.
But all that's changed. Today Schnyder's using the IRISPen Executive ( IRIS Inc., 800-447-4744, $399), which looks and operates like a highlighter but is actually an OCR scanner that automatically inputs into a computer any text, numbers, or bar codes over which it passes. Now Schnyder impresses his fellow airplane passengers by plugging the scanner into his laptop and sliding it across the nuggets that interest him. "People think it's so cool," says Schnyder. "All that stuff that typically sits in some drawer I now have in my computer instantly." --Alessandra Bianchi
