This story appears in the
September 2001 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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Search Me
Internet, intranets, tech magazines-this
engine searches it all.
Stuck in a search rut? Online search engines aren't your
only option. AskOnce from Xerox aims to refine searching by allowing
access to all the information available to you via a single query.
The program's simple and advanced searches scour the Internet,
your intranets, DocuShare (Xerox's Web-based storage space),
tech magazines and specific databases. The simple search resembles
a typical search engine but accesses more information. The advanced
search is less intuitive but more robust-offering tools such as
scheduled searches. For finding documents buried in your network,
AskOnce is handy, but its online capabilities fall short of a good
Web meta-search engine. The price for 50-user licenses starts at
$7,000 (street).
Photo Finish
Making images pretty for your Web
site
You live in the three-dimensional world, but your Web site is
stuck in a two-dimensional place. Photovista Virtual Tour can help.
This $250 (street) Web-authoring package from MGI contains three
applications: Photovista for creating panoramas, Photovista 3D
Objects for creating 3-D Web images, and Virtual Tour Maker, which
allows you to link the objects created with the two other programs.
All three are easy to use, with clear step-by-step instructions to
guide your way. The final results are impressive, but the process
is far from quick: You have to create the digital images you use
for both the panoramas and 3-D objects, which can be a
time-consuming photography project in itself.
Liane Gouthro, a former technology reporter at PCWorld.com,
freelances from her home in Brookline, Massachusetts.