After just a few days in the hands of receivers, online technology analyst company the451 (www.the451.com) has been saved by a management buyout. The service was co-founded by former Financial Times IT correspondent Paul Taylor and employs around 25 people. In an e-mail to subscribers, chief executive Martin McCarthy said: "I am pleased to announce that I have led the existing management team of the451 in concluding a successful management buyout of the assets of the firm as of today. The451 team will continue to produce a quality, innovative service. We will listen more closely and write more crisply. We won’t forget that we are here to serve you."
A useful device for any journalist is the C-Pen (www.cpen.com) from Swedish company C Technologies. No bigger than a pen, this little electronic wonder lets you scan text from any print source and store it in its memory for transferring to a PC. The 600C entry-level model costs £139 (inc VAT) and can store up to 1,500 pages of text, while the more advanced 800C costs £199 (inc VAT) and can store up to 2,000 pages of text. So rather than having to cut out a clipping, you can digitally scan it and store it quickly and safely on computer. Another very handy feature is its ability to scan languages and convert them into English. Watch for next week’s competition to win the C-Pen 800C.
Personal finance information resource Find (www.find.co.uk) has struck a deal with The Times and The Sunday Times to offer a version of its directory. Since launching in October 1996, Find has grown into a very focused resource and the version offered to Times Newspapers is part of its strategy to offer a co-branded service to other sites. Where other personal finance sites have struggled, it’s good to see that Find has managed to keep itself geared to being what it is good at: being a simple-to-use and easy-to-understand directory of financial information.
If you fancy moving from a PC to a Mac, Apple’s new iBook range of notebooks may be of interest. The new entry iBook 500Mhz costs £1,099 (inc VAT) and offers a 15Gb hard disk as well as 128Mb of RAM.
With news aggregation site Moreover (www.moreover.com) becoming less consumer focused and more geared towards business-to-business, NewsNow (www.newsnow.co.uk), one of the original UK news aggregators, continues to deliver an easy-to-use service featuring headlines to hundreds of categories.
Leslie Bunder
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