The 11 Million Businesses Phone Book Reviewed by Eliot M. Gelwan A program like this represents the flip side of the current love affair with multimedia that has made a CD-ROM drive standard issue on most new PCs. Dull but immensely practical, it utilizes enormous storage capacity not for flashy sound or images but merely copious textual data. This is not entertainment by any stretch of the imagination - merely what is probably the most comprehensive listing of US and Canadian business listings available on CD-ROM , compiled from over 5,000 Yellow Pages directories and other sources. The price is right enough - $49 - that I believe I can forgive it its few weaknesses. The disk comes with both DOS and Windows versions. Unless you read the manual, it'd probably take some figuring out that you install the DOS version by running "install.exe" and the Windows version via "setup.exe." The user interface in both is simple and nothing to write home about but it gets the job done. One searches by filling in the blanks in the search fields. You can search by business name (or even just a portion of it) across all of North America or narrow the search by state, city, zip code or area code. You can also do a so-called "reverse search" to find the name of the business when you enter a phone number. (Handy, for example, for those of you who want to find out which of those phone messages comes from a creditor you've been trying to duck before you return the call!) The search engine is not very rapid. On my fast 486 computer and slow CD-ROM drive, at least, the limiting factor seems to be CD-ROM access time. This is unfortunate, because in a quirky fashion you can only enter search criteria one step at a time. For example, let's say I'm trying to find the phone number of "Andy's Diner" in my home town, using "Andy" as my search term. I have to wait for the program to pull up all the businesses in the US and Canada with the name "Andy" in them before I can tell it to narrow the selections to those in Cambridge, MA with a second round of searching through the previously retrieved set. By the way, it didn't find the Andy's I was seeking, one of the best breakfast joints in Cambridge. (Thankfully, you don't have to call to make a reservation for breakfast there yet.) It did, however, find many of the other quirky local businesses I set as a task for it. After playing with the program, it's clear to me that you can't exactly use it in lieu of the Yellow Pages, for the simple reason that you can't look businesses up by category. If I tried to find a nearby electrician, for example, I'd be restricted to businesses that had the search word - i.e., "electric" - in their name as listed. You also wouldn't be able to use it if you were, for example, a marketer trying to build mailing lists of likely prospects. For one thing, while the program tells you what street a business is on when you look it up, it doesn't show its address on the street. And while you can print a single listing out or have the program's auto-dialer call the number for you, you can't save a listing or listings to disk (although users of the Windows version, of course, can get around this by "printing" to disk) or copy it to the Windows clipboard to paste into another application. Furthermore, the program is metered by a proprietary system which makes the disc unusable after 5,000 "look-ups" or a year, whichever comes first.. By the way, I happened to notice that that's 5000 in each version. The DOS and the Windows programs are metered separately. Users might install only one version and not figure this out It seems to me, on the other hand, that 5,000 is probably plenty for most casual users. (Unless you have an awful lot of creditors to duck - just kidding!) The company justifies their metering system by arguing that, despite the massive volume of their database, they can charge the consumer a low price based on the premise that they will probably actually never need more than a small amount of that data. I think American Business Information, the publisher of this CD-ROM, intends this program to be a kind of "loss leader" to gain business for their consulting and direct marketing enterprises. The company's annual report is included in the program's packaging, which is geared much more toward profiling ABIs' other services including a full on-line database of the same 11 million businesses including much more information on each, such as credit rating, sales volume, and names of owners and managers, "making business to business marketing possible." Arguing that there is "no substitute for telephone verification.", they say they update this database by a laborious annual process of over 14 million phone calls. They also use, they recount, corporate annual reports, government data, business magazines and newsletters, and the Post Office's National Change of Address program to ensure the accuracy of their data. Even if it is only an afterthought in ABIs' scheme of things, however, the 11 Million Businesses Phone Book are beneficiaries of this effort. System Requirements: Minimum RAM: 640K (Windows version), 420K (DOS) , Minimum 2 MB available disk space (3 MB with sound), MS-DOS 3.3 or higher (for DOS version), or Windows 3.1 (for Windows version), CD-ROM drive with Microsoft CD-ROM extensions ver. 2.1 or higher, Optional: Soundblaster card (for spoken phone number capability), Hayes compatible modem (for auto-dialling capability) American Business Information 5711 South 86th Circle, P.O. Box 27347 Omaha Nebraska 68127-7347 phone: (402) 593-4595 fax: (402) 331-6681 Send your postal name, address, city, state, zip to 1prod@supportu.com for product literature to be sent to you via postal mail.