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by John H. Wood
Switchboard (URL: http://www2.switchboard.com/), World Yellow Pages NETwork (URL: http://wyp.net/) and BigBook (URL:http://www.bigbook.com/) are free nationwide residential and business directories on the Internet’s World Wide Web.
In the third week of February 1996, Switchboard became available on the WWW. This site is similar to a national telephone directory, but it is not a cross-reference directory. One enters the name of a person or business and searches nationally for hits. Searches can be limited to a single state or a single city. If you choose to register with Switchboard, you can personalize your own listing, to include your email address, your fax number, your organization and an updated or corrected address or telephone number. You are given a password so that only you can update your listing any time after you register. Switchboard claims to have over 90 million residential listings and over 10 million business listings.
On the World Wide Yellow Pages NETwork Website one can search business and residential directories for the entire USA and Canada. There are over 105 million listings, and every business and person is given a free home page with its own URL. You can create a free Web page for yourself or your business with a 300 word description. From our point of view, this is also a great business tool, whether it is used for skip tracing or to locate an investigator or independent insurance adjuster in a distant location.
BigBook, Inc., was founded in 1995 to build a whole new kind of Yellow Pages: one that would include all the business information that consumers need—and features to let them get to the information quickly and easily. This is a great site to advertise your business or to locate any business.
Another site, http://www.telephonebook.com., enables one to search 10 million businesses. On page 44 of the March 4, 1996, issue of BusinessWeek, an article entitled “Blood On The Yellow Pages” delves into the competition that is now heating up with the directories being offered on the Web. According to this story, the yellow-pages market is worth $10 billion and may be the future gateway to all kinds of electronic commerce services. These directories could serve as the onramp into cyberspace for the country’s 9 million small businesses.
The March 11, 1996, edition of Forbes also carried an article on this subject (“PC 411,” page 158) that includes information on the directories available on CD-ROM. This article states, in part, “Unofficial telephone directories like these are only as good as their raw material, which in most cases consists of entries laboriously typed in from printed phone directories. Thus, they aren’t as up-to-date as the computer databases used by directory assistance operators. But the fact that their information is digitized and can be manipulated with a personal computer makes them far more powerful than anything currently offered by a Bell operating company.”
I can easily envision how insurer claims staff or attorneys seeking an independent adjuster or private investigator will soon be using these virtually free resources. They are more economical to use and more user friendly than the Bell operating company’s information operators and they offer search and information retrieval capabilities that are not available through the telephone companies. In addition, I suspect many independent adjusters and private investigators join associations mainly to have their firms listed in association directories. While that will not soon change, eventually it will, as clients begin to use the directories on the Internet. When a property claims adjuster seeks a contractor in a distant and unfamiliar location, or an investigator needs a public records provider on the other side of the continent, you can now let your fingers do the walking and find someone doing business in the city or area code of your interest. If the person or firm you locate on a Web directory has an email address, you will be able to send them a message almost immediately.
If you want to contact someone who does not have an email address, you’ll soon be able to communicate with them instantly anyway, using voice communications over the Web. Marc Andreesen, co-founder and vice president of technology at Netscape Communications recently announced that Netscape will build voice software for making low-cost long distance calls via the Internet into its Navigator program within the next six months. Andreesen told The Sydney Morning Herald that telephone companies could no longer justify the way they charge for voice telephony, especially over long distance. “We’re going to build the voice telephony stuff into our Navigator (software). We can get it out to 25 or 30 million desktops in the next six months. That’s a big enough critical mass for it to take off,” he said, according to the newspaper. He predicted phone companies would find much of their equipment “rapidly becoming useless.” The following is a list posting testimony I recently picked up on the Internet. It reveals what is already occurring, even before the Netscape release.
“I have used the cyberphone for some time. They do not restrict your time and the software is free from http://magenta.com:80/cyberphone/.”
“It works great, and the quality is real good. I have spoken to people all over the USA and with a 28.8 connect it is like using a phone.”
“Very easy to set up. I recommend using headphones, it sounds better.”
“Cyberphone is now recommending going to a new phone called Televox. This can be found at http://www.voxware.com They claim that it works with the netscape compression. It also states that this will be free forever.”
I haven’t tried voice communication over the Internet as yet, but it is easy to imagine how both voice and video communications will soon be available. The limitations may be that one cannot just pick up a phone and dial someone else anywhere at any time; you may have to set prearranged times to meet on the Internet. However, does anyone see how insurance company claims departments and others won’t eventually adopt these cost slashing techniques? While some say that the Internet is not currently cost justified to businesses and that they will wait until it is, many others see what is coming and coming very soon. At the very least, you’ve got to get into email and get your Website up—with its URL listed in every search engine you can find—or you will most certainly be playing catch up.
Once an insurer or a client adopts the Web’s cost-slashing features he will be seeking vendors (investigators, adjusters, attorneys, contractors, etc.) he can communicate with by email or voice mail over the Internet. When he doesn’t find such vendors, where do you think he will look for them? On the Net, of course. If your relationship with a client is disrupted because he cannot communicate with you on the Net, you may suddenly lose business before you know why, and then you’ll have to play catch up; possibly never regaining the lost business.
You can’t wait; you need to be a bit out in front of what is occurring. It is occurring so fast, that if you’re not keeping up, you may have to start so far behind the leaders that it could be fatal to your business. The starting point for the uninitiated is to buy a modem for the computer and sign up with an Internet service provider (ISP). The 28.8 baud (28,800 bps) modem (don’t buy anything slower) costs $150.00 to $200.00 and will likely be packaged with telecommunications and fax software. A subscription to an ISP will cost $15.OO to $30.00 a month for access to both email and the World Wide Web. The ISP will assign your email address (you may request a specific name, which is the part of the address before the @ in every email address) and should provide free software needed to exchange email and to surf the Net. One then needs to go online and gain experience. It is not difficult. It is becoming an absolute necessity.
(John H. Wood is President of Wood & Tait, Inc., a Hawaii-based private investigations and independent claims adjusting agency. His email address is pi@ilhawaii.net. The firm’s Website is at http://www.maui.net/~berit/WoodTait.html.)
© Copyright 1996 Alikim Media