Publication Date: November 8, 1996

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Keeping an Electronic Eye on Business

By Anita J. Freed

Looking for your rivals' product announcements? Press releases? Financial data? They're available in cyberspace. News articles? Company profiles? Industry statistics? Just keystrokes away. Independent product reviews? Pricing information? Stock reports? ... The list is endless.

For the sales representative or other business professional who tracks clients and competitors, the abundance of riches on the World Wide Web is both blessing and curse: Just about anything you want to know is out there, somewhere, in a great unordered universe that can be time-consuming to navigate and frustrating to keep tabs on.

"The biggest complaint about the Web is that it's hard to figure out what you want," says You Mon Tsang, a product manager for Traveling Software. "How, as a user, do I find the information I want? How do I keep track of sites without getting everything?"

That's precisely the problem many companies are trying to address through a variety of products and services. Personalized news feeds such as Pointcast, for example, deliver targeted "broadcasts" to the desktop. Information retrieval services such as OneSource Information Services and Individual, Inc. offer streamlined packages of industry news, statistics and financial data (see related story). Another option—and one that is particularly attractive to mobile workers—is software that monitors Web pages, captures updated information and supports off-line browsing.

Taking the Web Off-line

Several companies—FreeLoader, ForeFront Group and Traveling Software among them—offer products that support off-line Web browsing. In general, these applications enable you to download a set of Web pages to your hard drive and to view those pages later without a live Internet connection.

Off-line browsing tools won't save you from having to plow through the Web to identify the sites you want to track. That's where good searching tools and a bit of surfing time come in handy. What makes these applications interesting, though, is that they offer the potential for enormous time savings.

First Floor's Smart Bookmarks and Traveling Software's WebEx, for example, automatically identify and download new content for specified Web pages, saving a user from having to revisit those sites everyday looking for new or changed material. They also preserve unchanged graphics and text on your hard drive, so updating pages can be quite fast.

"It's actually a lot more efficient than browsing online because the cache of an off-line browser is much smarter than that of regular browsers," says Tsang, of Traveling Software. "Regular browsers are dependent on time (emptying cache at some set interval) while the off-line browser will keep the items you need."

Among other advantages of off-line browsing:

• It can significantly cut down on your Internet connect time, and the fees that go with it, making it particularly attractive to those people who work from home or from remote offices with dial-up Internet connections.
  
  
• Working from your hard drive is generally faster and more reliable than working over a live Internet connection (though saving a lot of Web pages on your hard drive will eat up some disk space).
  
  
• Downloaded Web pages are portable, making it easy to take a piece of the Internet with you if you travel for business.

That last feature can be an especially powerful tool for a mobile worker whose company has an intranet. A sales representative, for example, could use an off-line reader to access a Web-based sales demonstration or product catalog during a client visit without needing a live connection to the corporate network.

A Few Reminders About Online Information

While off-line browsers can make monitoring the Web easier, it's important to remember that they help little in evaluating the quality of the information you find there. So whether you are using an off-line browser or are searching the Web solo for competitive information, here are a few reminders about gathering information online:

Beware of the spin: Corporate home pages are great places to keep track of your rivals' marketing efforts—particularly when it comes to new products or services—but don't expect much in the way of impartiality. For independent information, seek out reliable newspaper, magazine or government sites.

Watch the dates: There's a plethora of information on the Web. Not all of it is new. Inactive, abandoned and just plain old pages can languish on the Web. Look to pin down the "publication" dates of any material you find.

Know the source: Publishing a Web page is relatively cheap and easy, and inaccurate information abounds, so it's important to know who your sources are. Stick to reliable information providers: Government agencies, trade associations and news outlets are good places to start. And try to verify any information you receive with another source.

Anita J. Freed is an Internet project manager at DCI.

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DCI's Internet Expo, Field and Sales Force Automation Conference and Business Online Conference cover a wide range of topics concerning the use of the Internet for business.

Related articles - Applying a Filter to the Information Stream and 10 Sites for Business-Related Information

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