REVIEW: CD-ROM - SELECT PHONE Phonebook on CD-ROM, Pro CD, Inc. 1995 This is the slickest name/address/telephone number database and search engine I've seen yet. I guess its the investigative nature in me, but I like the idea of having access to every listed telephone number in the U.S.A. but I'm not sure why! SELECT PHONE is on 5 CDs, contains 90 million listings from both White and Yellow Pages of 77.8 million residential and 13.8 million businesses. You can search for listings on any field: name, address, city, state, ZIP, area code, business heading and SIC code. But SELECT PHONE does more! It offers reverse search capability, matches addresses or phone numbers with names and provides counts by business heading or SIC code. And its fast - just a second or two to search for the listing you want. In addition you have unlimited downloading of listings into a database, word processor, spreadsheet or contact management program. The value and utility of this should be apparent to any salespeople, fundraisers, research and market testing firms, law enforcement agencies, private investigators and so on. In addition to all those tricks, SELECT PHONE allows wild card searches and the output can be directed to galley, mailing label, delimited ASCII or .dbf formats and supports autodialing as well. The interface is very impressive as well. Simple click on the icon you want. If you try the door icon you'll get a listing of the neighbors of the listing you've found. And finally, if you use Directory Assistance you'll be charged up to .80 per session and this can add up to quite a tidy sum if you use it a lot. But of main concern is the accuracy and timeliness of the information. Each year Pro CD purchases every single copy of the White and Yellow Pages directories that is published in the U.S. and Canada. Each entry is entered twice to ensure accuracy. Pro CD spends over 2 million dollars a year on maintaining its database and is the only telephone CD publisher that actually owns its own database. SELECT PHONE will be updated four times in 1995. Purchasers are offered a free update that extends the useful life of the product. Pro CD offers customer service , sales and technical support on the Net and states that it has future plans to provide access to its database and directories on the World Wide Web and through a gopher server. If you don't need all the glitz and neato tricks offered by SELECT PHONE, Pro CD also produces DIRECT PHONE which contains 72 million residential and 11 million business listings and is a perfect tool for finding a specific business or people by name. In addition to SELECT PHONE and DIRECT PHONE, there are an impressive number of additional products that contain FAX listings, European businesses and more. A new product, NET PHONE provides network users access to the database. Canadians haven't been forgotten either, with CANADA PHONE. I found SELECT PHONE very useful and performed quite well. I was able to track down some relatives and old friends and even see who their neighbors are. So, if Larry Cummings isn't home and I need to reach him I could call his neighbor and ask him to give Larry a message. I also was able to look up and see who all my neighbors are - at least all who are listed in the telephone directory. Unfortunately (or should I say fortunately?) unlisted numbers will not appear, unless they are listed some other way. After playing with SELECT PHONE its apparent why it was the first business title to crack the top 10 CD-ROM best seller list. %T Select Phone %I Pro CD Inc %C Danvers Massachusetts %D 1995 %P 1-800-99-CD-ROM Direct: $169.00 Subscription (X4) $299.00 Average Street: $160.00 %O CD-ROM for MS-DOS, Windows/MPC, Macintosh. %K telephone number & address database (C) 1995 Michael Crestohl Nahant Massachusetts USA mc@shore.net DISCLAIMER: I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in the success or failure of the book or materials reviewed herewith, nor have I received any compensation (other than a review copy requested by me) from anyone who has. All opinions expressed are strictly my own. Other Internet and Aviation book/software reviews by me can be obtained by anonymous FTP from: x2ftp.oulu.fi in the /pub/books/crestohl directory.