The IKON Index, a national survey of midsize businesses in 15 American cities, found that Chicago companies are lagging behind businesses in other cities when it comes to building corporate networks.
Only 21 percent of Chicago businesses with more than 50 employees and revenues between $5 million and $25 million have fully networked their computers, compared with 42 percent of all companies surveyed.
But when it comes to the important stuff, we’re ahead. Seventeen percent of the Chicago companies have already solved their Year 2000 problems, compared with 9 percent of their counterparts nationally.
You can keep your chipotle-raspberry vinaigrette. Chicago is still a meat-and-potatoes town.
SPECTACLES
VIRTUAL THRILLS
If you were disappointed to learn that the young couple who promised to lose their virginity live on the Web were just kidding, the British have come up with a live event to slake your thirst for voyeurism on the Net.
Beazley Furlonge Ltd., an insurance underwriter, has set up a camera so you can sneak at peek at the exciting action of its underwriting staff at work on the floor of Lloyds of London.
They are, thank heaven, fully clothed at www.beazley.com.
THE INTERNET
YAWN
NetRatings, a service that tracks Internet usage for advertisers, quantified the World Wide Wait with some figures released Friday. NetRatings calculated that a surfer waited an average of 15 seconds for a Web page to load and viewed an estimated 1,068 Web pages in June and 1,221 pages in July.
That’s an average wait of 9.4 minutes a day or about 5 hours a month. Based on NetRatings’ 43.1 million estimate of Web users over 18 who surf from home, this translates to an average monthly total of 215.5 million hours waiting for pages to load.
Let’s hope there’s something worth looking at when they finally get there.
RADIO
WAVE COLLECTOR
AM radio is one of the oldest of modern technologies, and with all the hoopla over the Internet, digital TV, DVD and the rest, AM seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. Now comes Terk Technologies’ AM Advantage, a new kind of antenna that dramatically improves reception of radio stations that play hard to get.
The circular antenna works on the principle that when it comes to capturing AM signals, more is better. A typical portable radio has a built-in antenna that extends to 18 or 20 inches; the AM advantage wraps 960 inches of antenna into a 9-inch circle.
Neil Terk, president of the company, says AM signals are tough to capture with small antennas because of the physical size of the radio wave itself. He says his $49.95 antenna focuses the signal the way a lens focuses dim light.
The antenna even helps office workers listen to AM radio–as long as they sit pretty near a window.
