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Hoover's Cleans Up The Information Business

Hoover's Online has released My Hoover's (http://my.hoovers.com/Hoovers/NetBook.html), a free service allowing users to customize Hoover's Online to meet their individual research and information needs. Users may now select the companies and industries they need information about, choose the sources they wish to receive news from, and save search engine queries.  Additionally, users can add features like market and analyst updates, earnings announcements, split and dividend announcements, SEC document searches, an IPO calendar, and local weather information.

New Currency Conversion Website

Business Wire: April 17, 2000. OANDA is launching a new Web site, OANDA.com, "The Currency Website." This site will allow business customers to localize prices on their on their Web sites, integrate accounting and procurement systems, verify historical currency exchange information, and assist in expense reporting. The site will be up in May 2000, BUT..

...you can grab a sneak preview at http://us.oanda.com/index.htm. This page is a full table of information that takes a few moments to digest. You get a quick table of current exchange rates for the US dollar, UK Pound, Euro, and Yen. There's the "Big Mac Price Index," showing the prices of those burgers in several different currencies. There are headlines, quick converters, and several other varieties of information available from the front page. There's even a currency trading game (you'll have to register, though.)

Lawyerware

Lawyerware helps you look for legal-related technology products. The computers in a law firm don't merely run WordPerfect (though a couple of lawyer friends assure me that it occasionally seems that way.) Lawyerware  (http://www.lawyerware.com ) offers a searchable subject index of legal-related software. Some of it's not really legal-related but handy to have around (there's a section for file recovery and file removal) while some of it is definitely legal-related (a section for estate planning and another for legal forms.)

Not everything listed here is a downloadable product; for example, the legal forms section includes FindForms.com, which is an online search engine of legal forms. (The ones that are software are marked "Software" while the ones that are web sites are marked "NetApp.") In addition to these listings, Lawyerware also offers headlines, software reviews, and Web site reviews.

PaperChase

PaperChase makes searching several medical databases easy. This is one of those resources that I think everyone on the planet EXCEPT me knows about. PaperChase, at http://www.paperchase.com/, lets you search MEDLINE, Aidsline, CancerLit, HealthSTAR and OLDMEDLINE, which equals over 11 million medical report abstracts. It's a subscription-based service -- $19.95 for a month or $150 for a year -- but there is a free trial available that requires registration.

Search for Research? Why not..?

If you've ever wondered where those news stories that say things like "By the year 2003 people will be using Etch-A-Sketch to connect to the Internet," you can find out here. Those great research group press releases and summaries come to rest at Bitpipe (http://www.bitpipe.com).

Bitpipe is devoted exclusively to IT analysis and research. You can browse their database by subject, check out the analyst company listings, look at the analyst Q&As, and browse the new research. There's also a really cool news alert service called KnowledgeAlert  (http://www.bitpipe.com/knowledgealert.html). You'll be able to fill out a short profile form and get updates, by e-mail, when research of interest to you is added to Bitpipe.

Bitpipe's search engine will take a few minutes to get used to. You have the option of searching by research, subject, or company. Let's say for example that I want to find out what's going on in the broadband access market.  If I searched everything (research, subject, and company) for broadband, I get 19 results. If I searched just subjects, I wouldn't get any results. Play with the different categories when you use this search engine, and when in doubt, search everything (because Bitpipe will show you your results divided up into categories.)

Insite2 Expanded to New Horizons

Business Wire: April 17, 2000. Intelligence Data has enlarged the collection of information available on Insite2 (http://www.intelligencedata.com/html/insite.htm). They have added 74 new trade journals and profiles of more than 3,000 Canadian companies. Insite2 now offers nearly 2,600 publications including China Economic Review, Asian Review of Business and Technology, Airline Industry Information, Bioworld Financial Watch, and Electronic Commerce News. Their collection of company profiles now exceeds 200,000 companies worldwide. Additionally, Insite2 provides access to the content of 20 newswire services. You can read their press release with the announcement at: http://news.excite.com/news/bw/000417/ma-intelligence-data

Construction Industry Has New Communication Tool

Construction.com is introducing Constructionmail, an email newsletter that will provide industry information to construction professionals. The newsletter will pull information from FEW. Dodge, Sweet's Group, Engineering News-Record, Architectural Record, and Design-Build. Users may register for this free service at Construction.com. You'll have to fill out a little form that's not too bad. They ask you who you are, what your company is, zip code, and what your role is in the industry (and they do have an "other" option.)

After you've done that, cruise around this site a little bit. It's not bad. They have headlines from several different sources (including an article on the increasing US prison population, filed under "buildings") as well as construction-related resources like a green building products guide. Research nuts might enjoy the construction-related cost index pointers at http://www.construction.com/ceintro.asp

Construction.com is a portal in the truest sense of the word -- it opens up into several different collections of information, including those from Engineering News-Record, Architectural Record, and so on. Because of that you'll find yourself jumping off the main pages into sites that are clearly from the same group but have a different domain name or different design colors. Just keep watching for that "sitemap" link at the upper middle part of your screen.