Beginning in 1949, Used Equipment Directory was the first magazine to list available used capital equipment by category instead of by selling dealer. Other magazines soon followed suit, some copying UED so closely that even a few spelling errors survived. HSI's collaboration with UED begin in 1978 pre-dating the existance of the current company. Initially our job was to improve on the data input system and we introduced a Data General minicomputer to do the job.

As time went on, it became more and more apparent that printed magazines had way too much lead time to be useful in a volatile market like used equipment. Although we worked to shorten the "closing cycle" from weeks to days over a period of years, the introduction of web-based advertising started to take its toll. HSI was instrumental in the design and implementation of the online version of UED which came to be called "UED-ed" (UED electronic delivery). For several years as subscriptions to the online version increased, UED continued to publish both versions. Finally the December 2009 issue was the last one seen in print.

The new system has a closing cycle of about 10 minutes and is available on-line at all times. It is produced by a series of custom C (what else) programs. Rather than going along with the "industry standard" of turning print pages into some silly page-turning analog of a print magazine we adopted a completely different approach. The table of contents page is delivered by email to some 60,000 recipients each month; each item on the contents page links to the correct page on a separate web site that implements the magazine. There is none of that "continued on page 46" stuff and a user can go right to the desired content immediately.

This is an example of our thinking. Rather than do what everybody else does, we do what we think is right. The result is a highly-useful product that makes the competitors embarassed to show their attempts.

Call us if you would like something like this done for you.