Best Free* Stuff Online (*Get 'em While You Can!)

Free Stuff@Work

Fax Facts

JConnect Free Many sites provide free phone numbers for incoming fax and voice messages, but J2 has been doing it the longest--for a fee--under its former name, JFax. Now the JConnect Free service does the same at no cost and asks for very little personal information in return: name, e-mail address, age, gender, and zip code. You'll get a unique phone number that forwards messages, in the form of well-compressed audio and image files, to your e-mail in-box. If you overuse the service, however, J2 may ask you to limit your usage, and the company may cancel the account if you don't--a prudent policy, and one that should ensure JConnect doesn't go the way of other failed free services (although JConnect doesn't define what it considers "overuse").

Site to Be Seen

Freeservers This domain-registration site will give you 20MB of Web site space free, as well as a host of terrific features (you don't actually need a domain to have a site hosted here). For instance, you can import or upload sites wholesale via FTP or a Web-based tool, or build new pages using easy-to-follow templates. Freeservers also processes e-mail sent to your domain (if you have one), either by forwarding it to the account you specify or by storing it in a Web-based mailbox at the Freeservers site. Its tools for analyzing your site's traffic are sterling: You can view daily or weekly breakdowns of the pages that surfers visit, the browsers they use for surfing, and the referral pages that send them to your site. Not bad, in exchange for letting the service display just one ad banner.

I Spy

Company Sleuth Whether you want to keep tabs on your competition or you simply want the lowdown on companies you invest in, Company Sleuth can help you keep track of what's going on. You sign up by entering the ticker symbols for the companies you want to watch, and the site will collect information on them--culling data from press releases, news sites, job listings, investor forums, and SEC documents, as well as Net domain and trademark registries. It can serve up the info in a neatly compiled page or e-mail a regular digest of what's new with a particular company. Even if the report is just a quote from someone bad-mouthing the firm in Yahoo's investor forums, you'll still wanna know about it.

Web Cop

NetWhistle How reliable is the company you pay to host your domain's Web site and e-mail? NetWhistle's PersonalWhistle will tell you. This free monitoring service pings your Web site at fixed intervals to see if it's up. It can also check e-mail boxes at the same intervals. If there's a problem, the service logs it and notifies you via e-mail (or by pager, if your paging company has an e-mail gateway); it also delivers a weekly report card. The service will monitor up to five URLs or e-mail boxes at specific intervals; to either monitor more addresses or monitor at more-frequent intervals, you'll have to pay.

Good-bye to Office

Software602 Want to break free of your Microsoft cage? Software602's free word processor and spreadsheet program, 602Pro PC Suite 2000, is comparable to Office and compatible with it as well--the suite handles Word 2000 documents with several layers of tracked and highlighted changes in them and Excel documents laden with statistical formulas. You may never have to call on Microsoft again. Software602 also throws in a decent photo-editing tool that supports over 15 graphics formats. The 14.5MB program has no ads and no subscription fee. The company hopes to make money by selling you feature upgrades such as a thesaurus, as well as LAN and fax software. But its free offering is excellent and stands alone.

City of Bytes

AppCity For companies looking to dive into the Web-based software phenomenon and throw away their shrink-wrapped boxes, AppCity is a great place to try out some online programs. Download its 9.09MB AppPlayer, and you'll be able to run programs from AppCity's site immediately. The site offers tools for expense and time tracking, sales force automation, and project management, as well as others to help you track employees and memberships. Better yet, the site's AppZapper lets you easily create a custom application using drag-and-drop features. Certainly, there are more-sophisticated programs available--but not ones that are free, customizable, and Web-based so that you can access them from any PC.

Internal Affairs

Intranets.com Corporate intranets are great for organizing internal communications and helping to keep your workforce well informed and up-to-date on company news. Intranets.com provides an intranet for free--complete with a calendar for scheduling group and personal appointments, and a file-sharing capability that tells you who was the last person to work on a document. After you set up an administrator's account for your password-protected site, you can add participants at will. Employees can post messages to your intranet's home page, participate in discussion groups in the threaded messaging forums, vote simultaneously on projects and ideas in the polling section, and even share internal instant-messaging services.