Web Sites We Can't Live Without

For the answers to these and other questions, Hoover's Online remains the best stop on the Web. The site doesn't offer any information that you can't find somewhere else. But it does offer more information in one place than any other site, along with an easy-to-use interface and a fun personality. The site provides, at no cost, capsule profiles of more than 13,500 companies -- public as well as private, inside as well as outside the United States. But it's after you pay your membership fee that Hoover's Online really pays off. Members can access insightful profiles of more than 3,400 companies and in-depth financial information -- including quarterly and annual results, stock charts, market-value calculations, and historical data -- on more than 7,500 companies.

Membership also gives you full access to affiliated Web sites, including IPO Central (http://www.ipocentral.com) -- a comprehensive source of data on U.S. companies that have filed to go public -- and StockScreener (http://www.stockscreener.com). If information is power, then Hoover's Online is a power tool of the first order. We can't live without it. If CEO Express! offers a virtual window on world news and big ideas, and if Hoover's Online is a one-stop source for information on companies that you're encountering for the first time, then Company Sleuth (http://www.companysleuth.com) gives you an indispensable daily briefing on the customers, competitors, and business partners that you can't afford to lose touch with. Think of this site as your virtual competitive-intelligence unit.

Company Sleuth is smart, targeted, timely, and easy to use. You visit the site, register, and then list up to 10 companies that you want the service to track for you. From that point on, Company Sleuth delivers a daily email briefing on developments relating to those companies. It alerts you to patents, SEC filings, analysts' ratings, stock trades, job announcements, discussion-group postings -- and lots of other useful information that is "out there" on the Web. To learn more about a specific development, just click on a live link in your email, and your browser will call up your Personal Sleuth Site, where you'll find a link to the source of that information.

Keeping Track of Technology

We don't live there, you probably don't live there, but Silicon Valley has become the de facto capital of the new economy. If you're not in touch with the companies, the venture capitalists, and the new technologies that are shaping the Valley, then you're probably not in touch with the forces that are shaping the future of business. Even in a virtual world, physical location still matters.

That's why we begin every day with In Time For . . . Reports (http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/reports). This page, produced by the San Jose Mercury News, is updated several times each weekday with the latest information on technology and markets.

The first report, Good Morning Silicon Valley, is posted at 8:30 a.m. PST. It gathers items -- from the Web, from wire services, and from other sources -- that are of special interest to the Valley. There's an Asia Tech Update at 10:30 a.m. PST and an Israel Tech Update at 12 noon PST. A stock-market report, called Tech Stocks, goes online at 2:30 p.m. PST, and Internet Daily ("a Net news fix from CBS Marketwatch") is posted at 3:30 p.m. PST. Monitoring these feeds is the next best thing to living in Palo Alto.

Jesse Berst, 47, had a hunch. It was 1996, and he was editorial director of "Windows Watcher," a Ziff-Davis newsletter that he had started the last time he had had a hunch -- in that case, a hunch that a new operating system from Microsoft was going to be a very big deal. This time, his hunch was about the Web: He predicted that this phenomenon would be bigger than Windows and that savvy people would eagerly turn to an insider who could make sense of Web-information overload.

Thus was born AnchorDesk (http://www.anchordesk.com). "It covers tech-related topics, it has an attitude, and it's on your side," says Berst, when asked to describe what makes his virtual publication special. "We cut through the noise. We tell you what you need to pay attention to."

Lots of people pay attention to what Berst says. About 2 million people subscribe to AnchorDesk's free email alerts, which go out five times a week. But AnchorDesk is not just an email newsletter -- it is an integrated site that combines the best of both email and the Web. As a subscriber, you receive brief emails that outline key important developments and technology evaluations. To learn more, just click on the live link embedded in each email, and travel via the Web to a story on the AnchorDesk site. You can even submit your own thoughts to Berst and other AnchorDesk editors by using the site's "Talk Back" feature. You can also print a story, or email a story to a friend, with the click of a button -- two nifty options that AnchorDesk pioneered.

Why do so many people consider AnchorDesk to be a Web site that they can't live without? "People have an enormous fear of falling behind and an enormous frustration with information overload," says Berst. "Also, people want a voice: 'I've been in this industry for a long time, I have something to say, so give me a place to be heard.' Those are the two needs that we've been trying to serve since we started."