Your CD-ROM library - 20 CD-ROM reference titles of interest to small business owners - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1996 by Dennis Eskow

CIRCLE 131 ON READER SERVICE CARD

Pro CD Internet Directory 2.0

Rating: ** 1/2

WIN 95 / WIN

Open your Netscape, Internet Explorer, or other Web search tool the first time you use Pro CD Internet, and it will find your Web browser every time. It uses the hunting dog icon found in other Pro CD products..We clicked on an icon to find school districts and it gave us 178 records. Although most of the URLs (universal resource locators--the addresses that identify Web sites) were inactive and useless, a dozen were perfect, such as the Tucson, Arizona, district that fit all of our search requirements. We did the same search using Quarterdeck's Web Compass and found 15 school districts--all of them active. Thus Web Compass was much more efficient. As a search tool, Pro CD Internet is weak. We searched under the word Java--a powerful programming language for the Web--and Pro CD found only 30 URL listings, most of them inactive. If you do market research and need SIC codes, or if you do a lot of cold-calling and would like to look up and dial Internet subjects quickly, Pro CD Internet Directory may be for you. Pro CD, 508-750-0000, 800-992-3766, www.procd.com; $19

CIRCLE 132 ON READER SERVICE CARD

Microforum Internet Connection 96

Rating: ***

WIN 95 / WIN

If you know someone who complains about the cost of searching for specific Web pages (multihour phone calls), there is one offline search tool that comes close to solving the problem. Internet Connection 96 has a well-constructed internal database with Web search capabilities that other tools just don't have. Simply open your Web browser and ask the database to help you find a URL. If it can't find what you seek, it will go online and access the Web site with respectable efficiency and only an occasional blunder. Getting started with the software is so simple that the whole user guide is only four pages long, including the cover. This is the ideal length for a CD-ROM manual, and we'd like to see other software publishers follow Microforum's lead. We sought middle schools that have Web sites where children participate. We searched the internal database for school districts, then inserted middle schools, and finally clicked into the search engine to get a list of 128 districts. If you use the Internet sparingly, Internet Connection may be the intelligent URL hound you need. Microforum, 416-656-6406, 800-465-2323, www.microforum.com; $26.95

CIRCLE 133 ON READER SERVICE CARD

MISCELLANEOUS BUSINESS

jay Conrad Levinson's Guerrilla Marketing

Rating: ****

WIN 95 / WIN

Jay Conrad Levinson is probably the bestknown guide to help you through the frothy rapids of marketing on a small budget. In speeches, he rattles off money-saving, money-making, and customer-keeping ideas at a dizzying rate. His books are must-reads from cover to cover. And now, it's the Guerrilla Marketing CD. Some of it is silly, like the onscreen introduction with its mood-inducing voice-overs. Click on the Ideas icon and you get a notepad metaphor that lets you keep a journal. All of this is cute, but to get to the real value of Guerrilla Marketing, you have to fill in a brief profile and then use the master plan worksheet. Based on information you provide--annual revenue, cost of completing a particular plan, and more--the system prioritizes the steps in your marketing plan according to any number of criteria, including date, budget, and review date. Gold bullets point to line items that are essential to your plan. Blue bullets acknowledge that an element is useful but not essential. Houghton-Mifflin Interactive, 617-503-4800, 800-829-7962, www.hminet.com; $29.95