BusinessWeek Online Alerts is an innovative business news and information alerting system that allows users to apply unique filter mechanisms, so they receive only news and information of personal interest. Alerts can be in the form of popups and/or e-mails containing only articles or information of interest. The user chooses what form alert notifications should come in and in the case of popups, they can further choose where and how they want the alert popup window to appear on their display.

The application is the "receiver" portion of the system. It is a small and efficient program that is approximately 500 Kbytes total in size and runs as a background process on your computer.

Utilizing patent-pending technology, the application supports filtering of alerts through categories of interest and/or specific keywords (Triggers), such that only business news and information alerts that fall within your Interests or that explicitly match your Triggers are delivered to you. BusinessWeek Online Alerts can contain simple text, still images, or even instant-start video. All alerts typically contain hyperlinked text back to the source to display the full article in its entirety regarding the alert topic.

In addition to broad filtering capabilities, how and when alerts are delivered to your computer is entirely configurable by you. When an alert is delivered to your computer, it is your choice to display it in an Alert Popup Window or not. Regardless of whether you're logged in or not, the alert will be delivered directly to your Alert Messages List. In general, popup alerts will not be generated under the following conditions:

• You have suppressed the display of popup alerts from within the Settings tab, or
   
• You have disabled popup alerts, controlled via the menu entry, Disable Popups, or
   
• You are logged out or inactive

Minimum recommended configuration requirements for the application include any modern computer running WindowsNT® (or later); Internet Explorer® version v5.5 (or later), Netscape® v6.1 (or later), or Opera™ v7 Web browsers. The application supports dial-up or better connections to the Internet.

Important Note: Many anti-virus programs and even some browsers contain built-in suppression of popups, ads, and/or images. The default settings of such software may interfere with the normal operation of this program. Please refer to the Desktop FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) for more information regarding configuration of your anti-virus software to allow normal operation of this program.