(FORTUNE Small Business) – AbiWord.com There were a few good products that came out of the dot-com craze, and SourceGear had one of them. Unfortunately, the company's IPO failed to materialize, so it gave up on its open-source product--AbiWord--and set it loose for techies to play with. Today, more than 200 developers have worked to make the slimmed-down, 4.5MB alternative to Microsoft Word just that: AbiWord looks and feels exactly like Word, but comes without a lot of the fat features that aren't necessary for everyday word processing. It's great for reports and formatting letters (docs can be saved as Word files), but don't expect to render any fancy tables or pie charts: The program doesn't recognize such features. AbiWord execs say that tables--and other traditional meeting-friendly apps--are a post-release 1.0 feature.

Mollyguard.com Your company is hosting a charity luncheon or a silent auction, and the last thing you need to be doing is standing at the door collecting entrance fees when you could be sidling up to a celebrity guest or scouting out potential investors. Try Mollyguard.com, a service that sets up a temporary (but plain-Jane) Website where patrons can go to get event information and then pay, via PayPal. The best part? Keep gate crashers out by setting up "required" questions. Mollyguard charges only for successful transactions ($1 per ticket sold).

NPR.org The worst part of spending August on my great-aunt's farm as a child was enduring the fly-sticky heat of summer outside Austin, Minn. We knew we couldn't take it any longer when the barn kittens started panting like dogs, tongues out. Inside we found solace in the kitchen's serenity: lemonade, the musty-cool air of the basement, and the gentle monotone of NPR filtering throughout the room. Aunt Margie kept it on to keep track of her Texaco stock shares and whether or not the price of cattle dropped. Today, in my office without radio reception, I've found a way to reminisce about summers and get breaking news: NPR.org offers its popular programs (live newscasts and political discussions as well as archives of older shows) that can be streamed as Real Audio files right to my desktop.

Respond.com My mother doesn't work for you. That's a bad thing, because she's incredibly good at researching consumer-service solutions and coming up with a whittled-down list: who's the most reliable plumber in town, which Hy-Vee grocery store (East or West) sells Ritz crackers for less, which swimming instructor is least likely to traumatize her daughter (wrong on that one). It's not my mother, but Respond.com is the next best thing: I told it I needed an affordable Web developer (or try for extra office space, bulk-amounts of aspirin, etc.), and within 24 hours I got six personalized offers in my in-box from vendors that fit my price range.

Statistics.com Everyone knows that the validity of a business report resonates from the presence of sharp and reliable statistics. The problem: finding them. Statistics.com boasts such reports, ranging from market research to how many people pray for what. I checked it out but found no full reports, just links to sites where I could have my Website analyzed, and abstracts with statistics no newer than year 2000. That government link to the report that tells how many women-led startups there are in the U.S.? Dead. Same as you if you plan on using this site to beef up your brief.