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A short review of websites for business people from early 2000. 

There are lots of cool reviews of cool websites.  This isn’t one of them.  In the office, I use the Internet for work and this is a review of some sites that I use in my business.  I am looking at these sites as tools that help me in my work and I am reviewing them as such from a personal perspective.

Visto (www.visto.com).  This site used to be called Briefcase and I think that describes what it does really well.  My life revolves around my Outlook diary, address book, to do list, email and notes.  I use Intellisync software to download all this to my Pilot and Visto uses the same software to upload everything in Outlook to a remote, secure database.  Once the data is uploaded, I can access it from any web browser – at home, from a hotel, an airport or an internet café.  Because we have a permanent Internet connection at work, my PC uploads any changes or new email every fifteen minutes.  The great thing is that changes made online get synchronized back to your desktop PC.  More than any other web site, this one has changed the way I work the most. 

Expedia (www.expedia.co.uk).  I haven’t got round to booking my travel online yet, but I like to look up flights before I call our travel agent so I can get an idea of availability and routings.  I’ve saved myself a few lengthy stopovers this way.

British Venture Capital Association (www.bvca.co.uk).  This site shouldn’t be confused with www.bvca.com which is a bible clip art site!  I have been considering looking for investment into my business and this site has very useful resources for anyone thinking about this including detailed listings of venture capital firms, venture capital trusts and business angel networks.  Another site that I have found very useful in this area is www.startups.com which has lots of advice for people starting a business.  I used the business plan section to help me write my company’s business plan.

Google (www.google.co.uk).  Although I use Yahoo when I am looking for an obvious category of sites (like car rental companies), I find that Google is the best search engine when you aren’t quite sure what you are looking for.  I found the BVCA and the Startups sites through Google and sometimes it seems to read my mind.

AvantGo (www.avantgo.com).  Following my review of PDAs for Real Business six or so months ago, I ended up buying myself a Pilot V and this site makes it really useful.  It converts many websites into a format that can be downloaded into a Pilot and viewed on its little screen.  Every time my pilot syncs it downloads full text articles from the BBC, Wired News (which is a great site in itself), the Guardian and the Economist which I can read on the train or if I am waiting to go into a meeting. 

There a few reference sites that I find myself using a lot.  The Post Office site (www.royalmail.co.uk/paf)  is very good for turning postcodes into addresses and vice versa.  It turns out that the postcode we were given when we moved into our new building two years ago was wrong!  Yell (www.yell.co.uk) is a good telephone directory service and cheaper than calling directory enquiries.  Streetmap (www.streetmap.co.uk) used to be very slow but seems to have speeded up a lot recently.  It is a very good substitute for an A-Z but covers the whole country and now has wonderful aerial photographs of large swathes of the territory it covers.  The last cool reference site is Lexical Freenet (http://www.raisch.com/lexfn/) which is a bit like a thesaurus but trippy and more imaginative.  The best way to understand it is to try it out.  It’s particularly good at coming up with names for things.

Egroups (www.egroups.com) is an interesting site.  It lets you create and join email communities.  It lets you set up and run, or join, mailing lists without installing specialist software or setting up a server to do so.  In a sense, it is like Hotmail for mailing lists.  In its simplest form a mailing list is a way of emailing a large number of subscribers by sending an email to a single address which then forwards it to all the members.  This allows email conversations to take place between large numbers of people.  However, eGroups lets you optionally moderate these discussions and control who is allowed to join.  I use it to run a small mailing list of people who also run game development companies in the UK.

Finally, there is Privatair (www.privatair.com).  This is a private airline that will rent you your own 737 with just sixteen seats, a bedroom and shower.  I'd like to say I use their services a lot, but in reality, of course, it's only a daydream.  Still, perhaps if I plug their site in Real Business…

I know I said this was going to be all serious and work-related, but I wanted to share one fun site with you.  The Spam Haiku (or Spamku) site at [site now defunct - try googling Spamku] is dedicated to 17-syllable poetry about Spam (e.g. Sad and rejected, / No astronaut will eat you. / You rank below Tang).  There are over 15,000 poems there.  It's a good way to end the day.