HOT NEWS IN THIS REPORT:

1. Copernic 99 Plus - easy-to-use power search tool
2. Click2Learn offers "learning portal" for corporations
3. Web-based buying & selling comes of age
4. Check out this streaming multimedia technology
5. Increase your Web site's visibility!

Editor/Publisher: Jordan Ayan

Please feel free to forward this update to other executives in your company!

Questions? Feedback? Please visit www.create-it.com

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1. COPERNIC 99 PLUS - AN EASY-TO-USE POWER SEARCH TOOL

http://www.copernic.com

Searching the Web is getting harder and harder these days - according to one recent estimate, even the best search engine only categorizes a measly 15% of the Web's total content. Copernic 99 Plus, a new "meta-search" software program, can help you find the proverbial "needle in a haystack."

An easy-to-use search "wizard" allows you to define your search terms; Copernic 99 Plus queries multiple search engines simultaneously, removes any duplicate listings, and presents the results to you in a concise summary format. You can also view your search results in a browser window, which makes it easy to move back and forth between the search results page and the sites Copernic has found.

Applications for busy executives include doing market or competitive research and locating hard-to-find articles, vendors and resources on the Web.

This great tool is available in a free "personal assistant" version - Copernic 99 - which provides access to 4 types of Web searches from 30 sources. A more powerful "professional assistant" version, Copernic 99 Plus, searches some 125 sources in 21 categories. At $29.95, the "plus" version is a bargain, and will quickly pay for itself many times over!

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2. CLICK2LEARN OFFERS "LEARNING PORTAL" FOR CORPORATIONS

http://www.click2learn.com

Web-based training is fast becoming a hot business tool, as corporate trainers and senior executives discover how much money it can save in deploying corporate training courses and tracking how much employees learn. According to the International Data Group, Web-based training is expected grow to a $6 billion market by 2002.

Asymetrix Learning Systems, a leading provider of online learning solutions, recently launched a new "learning portal" site called click2learn.com, which combines an online course cataloging system with a free browser-based authoring and publishing tool. This unique system will allow anyone to create and publish online courses and receive royalties on courses sold through the click2learn network.

Click2Learn also plans to offer content hosting services to corporations, allowing them to create secure, customized catalogs of courses that their employees can access from any computer equipped with Internet access, anywhere. This frees companies from investing in Web servers to host its online training materials, while at the same time giving employees easy access to Click2Learn's extensive course catalog.

This package of services could be a major benefit for many companies, because it allows them to outsource the significant technology requirements of Web-based training to an outside provider, who handles content hosting, student tracking and testing, and even the authoring software. This approach allows your company's training staff can focus on what they do best: capturing your company's knowledge and deploying it quickly, easily and inexpensively to your employees, anywhere in the world.

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3. WEB-BASED BUYING & SELLING COMES OF AGE

http://www.firepond.com/default.asp?Scene=11000
http://www.siebel.com/products-solutions/echannel.html

Sales lead tracking and opportunity management is about to be revolutionized, thanks to a new genre of powerful new Web-based systems that are now starting to hit the market. Tools like Firepond's Signature Plus and Siebel's eChannel can significantly increase the efficiency of these customer-facing business processes, and could provide a significant competitive advantage for organizations that deploy them.

Whether the point of customer contact is a personal sales call or a Web site visit, these tools are designed to help customers configure product solutions tailored to their needs, generate quotations and place orders. In addition, these e-selling tools can be linked with back-end business systems, to help companies route sales leads, opportunities, accounts, and service requests to the appropriate market channel partners using configurable business rules and track their follow-ups.

Benefits of these powerful e-selling tools include closing the loop on sales leads, responding to customer inquiries faster and ultimately closing more sales. These systems may also represent a cost-effective way for an organization to grow its presence in an emerging vertical market, where investment in sales people and printed literature may not yet be justified.

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4. CHECK OUT THIS STREAMING MULTIMEDIA TECHNOLOGY

http://www.netpodium.com

A new Web-based service called NetPodium combines streaming media technology from Microsoft and RealMedia with audience interactivity, making it an attractive technology for applications such as providing training to mobile workers, "virtual" customer, distributor or developer conferences, and broadcasting corporate announcements to employees in multiple locations.

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5. INCREASE YOUR WEB SITE'S VISIBILITY!

http://www.keywordcount.com

Are your Web development and marketing managers looking for ways to increase your Web site's visibility? If so, take a look at keywordcount.com, an innovative service that can help you to optimize your site's placement in the major search engines. Many of these search engines use the frequency of key words in the page's text and meta tags to rank it versus other sites.

Simply input your Web site's URL into a form at keywordcount.com, along with the URL of the top-ranked site you want to compare it to. The site generates side-by-side summaries of the top 10 words on both pages and their frequency, and also displays the contents of both page's meta tags - helping you to see how to improve your page's key word content.

That's all for now! I welcome your comments and feedback on the Executive Technology Briefing, which will help me to focus it even more closely on your needs.

Jordan Ayan
President
Create-it!