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SEPTEMBER 21, 2000

TRENDS

What's Next, a Service That Will Sleep for You?
New companies aimed at saving you time will do just about everything you need to do but can't get to

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Some people are so busy they don't want to place their own phone calls, send their own e-mail, or write their own memos. They don't even have 10 minutes to spend at the 10-minute oil-change place. Today's do-everything-now culture, in which some folks are too pressed even to use time-saving devices and services, is spawning a crop of new businesses.

Evan Marwell did a double take the first time someone called his directory-assistance company, gave the operator a phone number, and asked her to place the call for him. The customer had the time and patience to punch in 3 numbers for directory assistance, but not 10 numbers to get the person he wanted to talk to. "It was not an uncommon occurrence," Marwell remembers. "I was amazed by it." He noticed people were asking for lots of things besides phone numbers.

So, this summer Marwell and partner Robert Pines started Quixi, a sort of digital-age assistant that places phone calls and does information-retrieval and shopping. A customer uploads her digital Rolodex and lets Quixi put her through to a colleague, a friend, her mom. If she needs to drive somewhere and doesn't have directions, Quixi will fax or e-mail them. If she's on a plane to Cincinnati and wants to see a movie after her meeting, Quixi will tell her what's playing and where. If she reads a review and wants to order the book, Quixi will have it delivered to her house.

"A WAY OF LIFE." It's a service "aimed at people who are time-starved," says Alex Pachetti, director of public relations for Quixi. "The people we're going after are mobile professionals. They use cell phones a lot...the people who have pricing plans of 800 minutes or more." While it's working out the kinks and getting itself known, Quixi is offering its service for free. Starting in January, it will charge a monthly fee, probably $19.95 a month, says Marwell. Clients range from people in the entertainment business, "for whom the phone is a way of life," to small-business people who can't afford an assistant, to corporations who want their salespeople to have it.

When Tom Mersch was in the software business, he used to leave sales meetings thinking, "I need to do a follow-up memo, send e-mails to certain people, let them know what happened." But he'd be in a rental car on the way to the airport, not in front of a computer. He is among a small group of investors who founded WeType4u.com, which has been operating since June. You can call the service, dictate a memo, and have it delivered via e-mail, fax, or postal service. "We're an e-convenience company," says Mersch. "How many people wouldn't drop $2 to save a half-hour?"

Transcribing the voice memos costs clients $2 to $5 a page, depending upon the turnaround time, which ranges from 4 hours to 24 hours. The company, which is located in Boca Raton, Fla., can do it so cheaply by digitizing the client's voice, compressing the file, and sending it via the Internet to India. There, some 300 employees type the pages and e-mail them back. According to Mersch, his average transcriptionist has a college education and all are proficient in English. "Here, these types of jobs go begging," he points out. "There, our pay scale is six to seven times the average monthly pay in India."

Performing "mindless" activities can have some benefits

Location also plays a key role in Bob Katz's auto-repair business, but in his case its proximity -- specifically to Boston's Logan Airport -- that gives him the edge. Typically, a business like his can expect to draw customers from a 2.5-mile radius. But Katz greatly expands that reach by repairing customers' cars when they are out of town. In addition to fixing the cars, Air Travelers Service saves clients the $18 daily parking fee at Logan and gives them a ride to and from the airport. Because the average business trip is three to four days and the average vacation is seven days, Katz's eight-man staff can fit those cars in around other, more time-sensitive jobs.

"I understand that I'm in the service business," says Katz. "The best feature for the customer is the time they save, even if they initially come for the savings in parking money." The get-it-fixed-while-you-fly service is a new twist for his family-owned company, Nu-Tread Tire, which was founded 67 years ago. He has hired a retired American Airlines executive, Carter Libbey, to help market the service, and he is looking into franchising it.

Building a business around the accelerating pace of American life seems to be a good bet, but it's not a sure one. When Gerald Celente, head of Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., was in Norway recently, he noticed that bragging rights belonged to people who had the most leisure time. "There, the proletariat carry cell phones, while the elite use them only for emergencies," says Celente, who doesn't own a cell phone.

BEYOND BURNOUT. He thinks that people who hire others to do things for them might be depriving themselves of some ancillary benefits. There's a reason certain chores are called "mindless," Celente says. "Your mind can't be going all the time." When it is, the problem becomes bigger than burnout. "It's road rage, it's air rage, it's Columbine, it's stress -- and people don't get it," he believes.

As Celente sees it, it's one thing if you hire someone to do something because you just don't want to. But, if you're under so much stress that you couldn't possibly do it yourself without falling apart, that's another thing.

In a survey by the Merck Family Fund five years ago, 28% of respondents said they had begun making changes that resulted in lower income but more free time, according to Eric Brown, spokesman for the Center for a New American Dream in Takoma Park, Md. His organization is about to embark on an update of that study, because he wonders if the red-hot economy has reversed that trend. As he sees it, people who don't have time to punch their own phone numbers or buy their mom's birthday gift aren't a very stable client base. How long before their lives start to unravel?

But Marwell disagrees. "If I make 20 calls a day and I can save a minute with each one, I have 20 minutes I can spend with my son. Anything I can do to get extra time, I will."

That's the attitude he and his fellow entrepreneurs are counting on: Time, no matter how thinly sliced, is money.