Lotus Development Corp is shipping Lotus MarketPlace: Business, the first member of its new family of sales and marketing tools designed to help US businesses find new customers: it runs on an Apple Macintosh fitted with a Compact Disk Read-Only Memory, which contains a database of names, addresses, telephone numbers, and marketing data on 7m US businesses, and enables users to navigate through the data to target customers, analyse markets, and, it hopes, create quality lists for business prospecting and direct marketing; the lists come from Trinet, a provider of business information and publisher of Contacts Influential Directories; the product sells for $700 including software, sample data, a data order form, documentation, and the first 5,000 names of choice from the Compact Disk disk; after returning the signed data order form to Lotus, the user is sent the most current data disk by overnight courier; MarketPlace data will be updated quarterly and users can either convert to an annual subscription with four additional quarterly updates for $150 a year, or add new names to the current disk, paying $400 for 5,000 additional names.
