CONTENTS:

• Line56
• FastBoot Resources

LINE56

Line56 bills itself as "the E-Business Executive Daily." The site provides a nice selection of brief profiles of e-business companies in the categories of software providers, infrastructure and networking, e-markets and e-business services.

Each profile provides the company's address, phone number, Web site, a brief review of the companies services, a list of top managers with titles, the number of employees and whether the company is public or private. Within the profile, click on the business category under Business Model to find links to other companies in that category with Line56 profiles. The profile also includes links to coverage of the company by Line56. Search for profiles within the categories.

http://www.line56.com/directory

Or, search the alpha listing.

http://www.line56.com/directory/index.asp

FASTBOOT RESOURCES

This has to be one of the busiest looking sites on the Web. The designers should explore the concept of white space! Eye-boggling layout aside, this site lives up to its claim of being "the surfer's starting point" at least for some search functions.

Links are conveniently laid out in drop-down menus. When you select a link, another browser window opens for that Web site. This is nice because you can explore the new site without losing your original page.

The FastBoot home page has a number of useful links for researchers, all laid out in categories. The reference and map sections can be helpful. You can also search Webster's Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, a Thesaurus and the Reuters/Associated Press site right from the home page. There's a city guide search engine, translators and many other resources to explore.

While these links are helpful, the people finder functions are real time savers. Use the People Finders drop down menu on the left side of the home page to access reverse directories and other search sources. Better yet, bookmark the Free People Finders page (http://www.fastboot.com/people_search.html).

This is a one stop mini-mart for finding people PDQ, although some of the links were dead ends (sigh). The People Finders drop-down menu, which is different than the one on the home page, has links to genealogical sites, the Dead People Server, Corp Tech people finder, adoption search sites, phone number and address search sites and other e-mail search engines. Use the search boxes to connect to Yahoo to do an e-mail or phone search. Or turn to WhoWhere and InfoSpace (don't forget to put in the country or it just sits there) for more address and phone number searches. Use WhoWhere to search for government employees (it couldn't find George Bush in D.C.!). Connect to RootsWeb to search the Social Security Death Index. Unfortunately, the search boxes don't tell you up front which search sources you are using, you find that out when it opens the new browser window.

http://www.fastboot.com

Chris Mildner

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