The wag who said that the main thing a woman should look for in a husband is somebody she’d like to have the children spend time with on weekends will love Kidmate, the “Joint Custody Program for Family Law Specialists.” It lets divorce lawyers use complex task scheduling software to arrange joint-custody calendars for multiple children of multiple religious persuasions right down to 15-minute chunks.
Kidmate, priced above $450 and aimed at lawyers rather than couples sailing toward the rocks, handles such conundrums as who covers day care on visiting days, which parent pays the soccer fees and which Christian and which Jewish holidays get spent with which parent. Details at www.kidmate.com.
BOOKS
ON DONDER, ON KITTEN
Speaking of religion (always dangerous ground), the world’s most successful commercial book-selling Web site, www.amazon.com, went out of its way last week to announce that its holiday selections include 4,500 books on Christmas but only 280 books on Hanukkah and a paltry 85 Kwanzaa titles. Oh, yes, they also list 60 books on reindeer and 45 cat calendars. Happy Kwanzaa.
AMERICA ONLINE
YOU’VE GOT VOICE MAIL!
Digital dealmakers at America Online and a Los Angeles outfit, JFAX Communications Inc., say they have cooked up a scheme that will let you have your faxes and voice mail forwarded to your AOL e-mail while you’re on the road.
Starting in January, for $12.50 a month (after a $15 startup fee), JFAX provides a phone number in 50 cities where people can call you and leave voice mail or send a fax. The fax or voice mail then gets sent to AOL as a sound file or picture. You can then click on an icon and get hassled by your voice mail playing on your laptop’s speakers in hotel rooms all over the planet for the price of a local call.
THINK TANKS?
BLIND LEADING THE BLIND
Information Week, the classy trade magazine aimed at the cream of America’s corporate information technology executives, reports in the current issue on its poll of 300 corporate IT leaders who were asked to rate the outside analysts who advise corporate bigwigs and tech beat newspaper reporters alike about industry developments.
The execs agreed that none of these high-powered outfits rates even an 8 out of 10 points, even though at least half of those who responded said they each shell out more than $40,000 a year to outfits like Jupiter Communications (7.5), Gartner/Dataquest (7.3), the Yankee Group (7.0) and Forrester Research (6.6).
Worse still, they grudgingly gave the analysts a composite 6.7 out of 10 grade for grasping the all-important Internet.
