Companies Wasting £1000's Searching The Net

- and this is when they are working!

A MORI Research Poll released today on behalf of Mediapps, a provider of personalised business portals, reveals that employees waste hours of their companies' time searching for relevant business information on the Internet. According to Mediapps, this is costing companies tens of thousands of pounds a year.

As the number of Web pages and Internet users are increasing by the second, it is becoming increasingly difficult for employees to find the information they need to help them do their job. 64 % of the survey's respondents said that they waste time wading through irrelevant information.

There are currently 2 billion web pages, searched by 14.7 million British adult users, 7.5 million of using the Internet at work.

Mediapps has estimated that if a typical company employee, earning 16318,000 per year, views six known web pages per day, for five minutes each, they will waste an average 96 hours a year logging on to the web pages alone. This amounts to a cost to the company of over 1631,000 per employee per year. This, of course, does not include the time spent searching for the right web site. The research showed that there is a growing demand for a more personalised Internet portal - 76% of the surveys respondents said that this would be a useful service.

Ian Wells Managing Director of Mediapps said "Information is knowledge, knowledge is power. As the business world moves increasingly faster, companies can no longer waste hours searching the Internet for business information. Information needs to be accurate, personalised and instant. Without this companies will wallow in a sea of potentially useful information, but never have the capability to pick out the 'nugget' that will have maximum effect."

Mediapps has estimated that companies using its Net.Portal product, a portal providing personalised industry specific business information to companies, would save thousands of pounds by using the Internet in a more time efficient and cost-effective manner.

Technical details

1. Launched in 1999, Mediapps' personalised portal software - Net.Portal - enables companies to provide employees with their own personalised gateway to its business systems. Net.Portal is configured around each users unique profile of requirements and interests. It continuously searches and aggregates the up-to-date accurate information needed. The information can come from the Internet, intranet or extranet. Net.Portal will then push the filtered information direct to the user's desktop or e-mail account. For users on the move, Net.Portal can deliver SMS or WAP alerts to mobile phones, to ensure the any selected information is never missed. Mediapps strategy is to provide not just the software necessary to create a portal but preconfigured information sources as well. When combined with ready to use user profiling, Net. Portal, Mediapps' Portal Generator, can provide rapid results right 'out of the box' with little or no coding required.
2. Net. Portal is available for three platforms: Lotus Domino, Java and Windows/NT
3. The research was compiled by MORI, from 9 -19 June 2000 using a survey of 1,256 regular Internet users.