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A collection of short articles about technology. Topics include selling houses with voice mail; installing face-recognition software; and making sure your call center is Y2K compliant.

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House Calls
The way to sell houses, the prevailing wisdom goes, is to bombard potential customers with phone calls and set up a site on the Web. Well, the prevailing wisdom is a lotta hooey. "Consumers are tired of pressured sales calls," says Peggy Primm, a real estate agent in Des Moines. "And the reality is that many people don't use the Internet, don't have E-mail, and don't want to talk to a computer about a home."

So with the help of a systems integrator, Primm created Voice Box, a Windows NT-based set of voice-mail and fax-back services that lets her distribute information to potential home buyers by phone when they request it. Primm assigns a unique phone number to each of her properties and displays it on a sticker underneath her agent number on the "For Sale" sign. If someone drives past a lemon-yellow colonial that strikes his fancy, he can simply punch the number into his cell phone and hear all the details--including price--which Primm records once a week. "They want the good ol' human touch," says Primm. "So I give them my voice, and I'm available 24 hours a day."

Primm's $15,000 investment in the technology behind Voice Box--an IBM Netfinity 3000 server loaded with Callware Technologies software and Lucent Technologies digital sound cards--is already paying off. In the quarter beginning October 1998, when she first began displaying Voice Box phone numbers on her properties, Primm took home $20,000 in commissions--as much as she made in the entire previous year. Primm says she's been able to sell more houses because she spends less time answering basic questions and more time helping customers actually buy. "By the time people call me on my cell phone, the questions they ask indicate they already know about the house," she says.

And with two 4GB hard drives on which to store messages, Primm leases space on the system to others through her marketing company, Fair Trade. For $25 a month, insurance and mortgage brokers can link specific information to each of Primm's properties ("press 2 for mortgage information," etc.) and make insurance and loan applications available for fax on demand. Primm even rents Voice Box to competing agents, and she wants to expand into other markets. "Every time I see a car with a 'For Sale by Owner' sign, I think, 'That guy needs a box!" she says.

For the real estate industry, in which agents often display their phone numbers to lock in customers and commissions, Voice Box is a novel and welcome convenience. "The point of having signs on the lawn is to get buyers to call the listing agent," Primm explains. "I believe clients have the right to be represented by any agent they want." She credits her broker affiliate, RE/MAX, with being open to Voice Box and the changing customer relationship it represents. "They let me spend my time meeting people's needs instead of hassling them," she says. --Andrew Raskin

LAN Lubbers
Small companies give up many things in the name of sticking to core competencies. Control over their own networks isn't one of them.

Source: Business Research Group (BRG)

The Face That Launched a Thousand Apps
Jon-Erik Prichard has so many passwords--for network files, E-mail accounts, and the like--that he constantly forgets what opens what. So when the CEO of Aqcess Technologies, a two-year-old manufacturer of clipboard-sized PCs in Costa Mesa, Calif., built a company extranet, he wanted to secure it without adding yet another "open sesame." At an Internet trade show he found his answer: access software that responds to faces instead of words.

TrueFace, from Miros Inc., of Wellesley, Mass., employs a video camera connected to a PC to record the mugs of people authorized to use certain machines or applications. Subsequently, every time a user logs on, the software matches the shape and size of his or her facial features with the stored image before granting access. Not only does TrueFace reduce password clutter, but it also improves security. "It's hard to hack a face," says Prichard.

The product--sans video camera--costs $59.95 to $199 per user, depending on the number of seats. All 35 Aqcess employees have it on their desktops; Prichard has also recorded the faces of 30 of the company's customers and suppliers so that they can access the extranet remotely. In addition, Prichard is installing TrueFace in his company's own product: a portable, stylus-based personal-computing tablet called Qbe.

TrueFace is just one of a host of new security systems that rely on biometrics--the technique of identifying people using body measurements. Bio-metric technologies include face and voice recognition; thermal imaging (which records heat patterns generated by blood vessels); and the scanning of fingers, hands, retinas, irises, and even the vein structure underneath a person's skin.

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