webware

PolicyMap is a collection of real estate, civil, and financial systems built into a mapping and charting engine. It can locate superfund sites; show you crime stats; tell you about mortgage originations (including things like subprime mortgages to various demographic groups), and age and educational background. The data is at a variety of resolutions (some is per ZIP code, some by census tract) and timeliness.

In many data sets you zoom into deep detail on your information. You can also build charts, for data sets with information over time, and generate preconfigured "community reports" for particular regions or … Read more

Google Maps is a simple Web-based service that lets you get directions and find businesses online. At its most basic level, you type an address or business name into the search bar at the top of the screen, and the map screen taking up the lower right portion of the window will zoom in on the location and plop a marker on the spot. You can then zoom in using a variety of view options, such as map, satellite, or terrain.

If you want to step beyond the pinpoint location, you can get directions, which are offered via three options: … Read more

Windows Live Hotmail is the latest iteration of Microsoft's free, Web-based e-mail service. The multipane interface lets you drag and drop messages into folders, or right-click messages for a menu of options. There's also a "Today" tab of news, both international and social, that loads when you sign in. Windows Live Hotmail even lets you choose a color theme in case you feel like customizing it to match your tastes.

Microsoft has also rolled out some useful features like instant spell-check, a built-in audio player, an RSS feed reader, and previews for Office documents and PDFs. … Read more

Gmail is Google's Web-based e-mail service. It was one of the first e-mail services to offer users 1GB of storage space for their e-mails at a time when others were offering just a few megabytes. Google's philosophy with Gmail is to aim for the needs of power users. That might sound like foolishly overlooking the much larger mainstream market, but it's actually preparing them for the future: given the increasing importance of Internet communications, an ordinary user tomorrow will face the same challenges as a power user today.

In the strictest sense, Gmail brings the paper-pushing productivity … Read more

RingCentral is a phone call management service can make small businesses look and function like larger ones with some pretty neat telephonic tomfoolery. The service has been around since early 2004, and has since introduced a slew of VoIP plans called DigitalLine that give users the option to use VoIP instead of, or on top of their existing landlines.

So what can you do with RingCentral? Small business owners will love it, since you can set up a ridiculously extensive set of rules to handle incoming calls, or reroute them on the fly with a virtual phone call manager called … Read more

Previously known as MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger is Microsoft's answer to instant messaging. While largely the same as its predecessor, Windows Live Messenger is unique for allowing you to share folders and files locally with fellow users. It also serves up the usual animated emoticons, winks, and buzzes, along with multiplayer gaming, free PC-to-PC calling, mobile phone messaging, and video chatting. Plus it adds VoIP capabilities that let you call telephones around the world for a fee. Its one major omission, though, is it lacks the capability to receive inbound calls from landlines or cell phones, a service … Read more

Digsby is online communication personified, basically rolling your instant messaging, e-mail notifications, and social networking into one interface. The range of features is impressive, going beyond basic chat protocol and Web mail and incorporating IMAP and POP3 support for e-mail, a wide variety of skins and other interface configuration options, as well as support for RSS feeds from your social network sites.

Digsby might easily be the instant messaging freeware of choice for the supersocial set. Web 2.0 fans, that's you. In addition to supporting the major IM networks--Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber--Digsby also pulls … Read more

Elance is essentially a virtual office building, designed to bring more small business owners into the world of hiring workers they don't know and will never meet. Here's how it works: hiring managers place some of the funds for a job into escrow accounts, from which Elance pays contractors when work is delivered or time milestones are met.

Elance offers a variety of tools to make the entire process--from hiring to project completion--run smoothly for all parties involved. There's a time-tracker widget for contractors that automatically feeds data into the project page and the invoicing system, a … Read more

Zillow.com is a sort of Kelley Blue Book for homes. It lets users type in an address and see specs on the home--its valuation, the date and purchase price of the last sale, and data on comparable homes. The site is ad-supported and thus free to the user.

The site offers valuations on more than 40 million of the estimated 85 million single-family homes in the United States, with some data on an additional 20 million homes. It also offers historical value changes for homes in chart form; historical value changes for homes as compared with the surrounding ZIP … Read more