FSB BROWSER
Sites to Pick a Cell Plan, Avoid a Jail Cell, and More
FSB columnist Maggie Overfelt selects the best online resources for your business.
By Maggie Overfelt

My Favorite Blogs Lately there are many nights when it seems as if all of west Manhattan sleeps but me. Hot tea doesn't help, so I forgo the nightstand book to take a trip through the Net's subbasement: Weblogs, those several thousand Web pages of opinionated blather. Armed with commentary on tech news, the slants are bound to spark my next big idea. I always start at Techdirt.com, because its frank discussions of how tech headlines relate to small biz help me understand what my editor wants to hash out. The lighter read of Wonko.com is next, because its geeks' opinions always make me laugh, no matter how joyless the news is (their reactions to a spicy-food report followed a sharp take on an AOL blunder and what it means for your customers).

Lastly, Snowdeal.org, with its dust-colored pages and philosophical approach to things like the digital music movement and biomedical news, preps me when it comes time to deal with Ivy League colleagues-- so I can keep that conversation running.

MyRatePlan.com Last month my mother made a swift decision to move from the Midwest back to California. She still doesn't have her own place to lay a landline, so she admitted--finally--that it'd be smart to invest in a cellphone. But it became apparent that the only thing she hates more than people addicted to their cells are the salespeople who sell them, so she decided to arm herself with rate-plan knowledge at MyRatePlan.com. There, by entering in her calculated usage (she wanted at least 300 minutes per month and the ability to roam when outside any California area code), she was ready to do battle with the local-service providers. Plus the site lets her estimate the costs of her monthly bill. Go, Mom!

TheCorporateLibrary.com Here's one site you'll never want to see your company on. It's a watchdog that asks whether public companies--big and small--are acting as responsibly as they should be. Are they trying to balance the best interests of shareholders, the board, and management? The site tracks news and government summonings of front-page companies, spreading awareness of the issues at stake. With the recent rash of credibility investigations into large companies, all CEOs should be reexamining their role.

Yet2.com In the last issue, I brought you a site that posts fictitious business plans to provoke new-product brainstorming. Did it work? If so, and the result has something to do with tech, then consider Yet2 the forum where you can sell it (or find a like-minded company to partner with). If you're looking for an already developed product to complement what you've got, see what R&D-heavy behemoths--like 3M, Dow Chemical, Boeing, and Toyota--have too much of. Laser-spot welding? A better way to control oven grease? This is the place. Price negotiation is up to you.

Yp.yahoo.com The only site I shake down more than any blog is Yahoo's yellow pages. I'm on it all day, searching for numbers to sources' secondary branches, as well as using it to find afterwork addresses (that BBQ place friends yearn to try). But Yahoo's results are too inconsistent. Sometimes you have to use "&" to get any results for a multinamed law firm, but other times it comes up blank if you don't use "and." It doesn't return listings for all cities that share an area code. And forget the accompanying map; it rarely matches the address. The problem is that, in my experience, Yahoo's the best of a bad lot. Where's that book again?

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