Williams Inference

iPhone owners were responsible for nearly one out of every 1,000 Web page views in November last year. As a point of comparison, devices running every version of Microsoft's Windows mobile operating system combined to make up 0.06 percent of Web page views. (WSJ, 12/11/07)

BitTorrent peer-to-peer sites have become as encyclopedic as Napster in its heyday. Any hit TV show, film or CD shows up instantly; even high-definition videos, such as Blu-ray, are starting to show up, though they can be up to 20 gigabytes big and take a week or two to download. (WSJ, 1/2/08)

The latest rankings by the OECD show the U.S. ranks 15th in terms of broadband penetration - down from 4 in 2000. Average speeds in Japan are 20 times faster than in the U.S., and South Koreans pay nine time less per megabit than Americans do. (BW, 12/17/07)

"She didn't even have a computer before." - Peter Lothberg, a networking expert in Sweden, who helped set up a 40 gigabits-a-second fiber-optic Internet connection for his 75-year-old mother, Sigbritt. It is believed to be the fastest residential uplink in the world. (NYT, 7/22/07)

Daniel Terdiman, author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life, says nine out of 10 people who sign up for the online virtual world never return because it is simply “too hard to figure out.” (New Scientist, 9/8/07)

Thunder Road is the first comic book released in the U.S. exclusively via cellphone, part of a lineup of mobile comic books offered by Kansas City-based uClick. (AP, 9/11/07)

Nokia has applied for a patent on a system that will let cellphones track electromagnetic pulses released by nearby lightning strikes. The system would warn you if the strikes are heading in your direction. (Popular Mechanics, Sept 07)

"Jim Webb has been very explicit that if it weren't for the blogs, he wouldn't be a senator from Virginia. He did not run a single television ad to win his primary, which is unheard of. He did one direct-mail piece. ..." - Markos "Kos" Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos. (Fast Company, June 2007)

"In the digital world, there's an audience for even the most obscure thing," says Charles Hodgson, a Canadian writer whose podcast, Podictionary, examines the histo¬ry and origins of one English word five days a week. His podcast has been downloaded 2.3 million times in less than two years. (USA Today, 3/16/07)

Last fall, Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum began offering free podcasts of its classical concert series. In one month, it chalked up some 40,500 down¬loads from 83 countries. "For this genre, 40,000 [down¬loads] a month is phenomenal," says Aaron Burcell of Podshow. (Fast Company, Feb 2007)

 According to Technorati, a blog search engine, 120,000 Web logs are created each day, and the number of blogs now exceeds 79 million. (New Yorker, 5/14/07)

Yamaha's Disklavier makes remote piano lessons pos¬sible. The acoustic piano connects to the Internet, send¬ing a signal between the two pianos. What the student plays on one piano is replicated by the connected piano in another geographic location. (Wash Times, 2/1/07)

"The number of prediction markets has climbed over the past decade. These markets aggregate information by inviting people to 'bet' on future events - the out¬come of elections, changes in domestic product, the likelihood of a natural disaster or an outbreak of avian flu. In general, the results have proved stunning accu¬rate. For elections, market forecasts have consistently outperformed experts and even public opinion polls." - Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Wash Post, 2/24/07)

Chicago Tribune reporters uncovered the identities of 2,600 CIA employees - including many covert opera¬tives - through a basic search of online data services. To the agency's embarrassment, the Tribune also easily found - but did not print - the locations of two dozen "secret" CIA facilities in the U.S. (The Week, 3/24/06)

The Denver Public Library is the first in the nation to offer free movies, concerts and videos to any cardholder with a fast Internet connection. (Denver Post, 2/16/06)

Al-Qaeda sympathizers are using Orkut, a popular, worldwide Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners. On Orkut, at least 10 communi¬ties are devoted to praising bin Laden, al-Qaeda or jihad against the United States. (USA Today, 3/9/06)

Tempe, Arizona, will have wireless Internet available for all its 160,000 residents in February, becoming the first city of its size in the U.S. to have Wi-Fi throughout. (AP, 12/12/05)

The nation's first city wide broadband-over-powerline (BPL) installation was formally inaugurated in October in Manassas. Virginia. COMTek, the service provider, is negotiating with nine other utilities and organizations to deliver similar services. (Tech Web, 10/5/05)

Current Communications Group is planning to offer high-speed Internet over electric power lines to more than two million customers in Texas. (WSJ, 12/19/05)

In Europe, KPN NV of the Netherlands recently said that the number of minutes the Dutch spend on free Internet chatting now exceeds the roughly 12 billion minutes the country's inhabitants annually spend on the traditional phone. (WSJ. 10/3/05)

New 3G technology, EV-DO (evolution data optimized), uses a credit-card-size "antenna" to give users superfast broadband in areas covered by phone companies. You can use it in moving vehicles, hotel rooms, even local parks and beaches. (Time Inside Business, Oct 2005)

At MySpace.com, 21 million monthly visitors spend up to several hours a day sharing their thoughts, photos, and music with friends on personalized home pages. Ditto at Cyworld; it claims almost a third of South Korea's 48 million people as members. (BW, 9/26/05)

A startup company called SunRocket is offering flat-rate local and long-distance phone service over the Internet for $199 a year. The company is serving 50 markets with fewer than 50 employees. (Chicago Tribune, 12/4/04)

In Oregon, when Chris van Rossman’s TV set went awry, a team of Civil Air Patrol volunteers and sheriff’s deputies appeared at his doorstep. The TV had started emitting energy at a frequency – 121.5 megahertz – that is reserved for international distress signals. (NYT, 11/1/04)

For about $52 a month, households in South Korea can receive 20 mbps VDSL service – connections fast enough for live high-definition TV. (WSJ, 8/26/04)

A number of McDonald restaurants are using a call center in Colorado Springs to process drive-thru orders. One store found that orders were filled 30% faster with fewer mistakes. (NYT, 7/18/04)

In Vienna, money has been transferred between banks using quantum cryptography for the first time. This new technology promises to make exchanging information 100 per cent secure. (New Scientist, 5/1/04)

Three U.S. cities now offer broadband service delivered over power lines - Allentown, Pa., Cincinnati and Manassas, Va. “The greatest advantage is that we only need to have an outlet to use it,” said Sean Porter, a Manassas architect. The city charges $26.95 a month, less than comparable DSL or cable service. (Wash Times, 4/5/04)

Dartmouth College is phasing out its standard telephones in favor of Internet-based telephones. (CHE, 6/18/04)

Brazil has one of the highest rates of Internet use in the developing world, with 95% of taxpayers using the web to make their annual income-tax declaration. The country’s voting system is fully electronic and its banking software is among the most advanced in the world. (CSM, 2/5/04)

A World Internet Project survey of people in 14 nations, including Britain, China, Japan, Spain and the U.S., found that television viewing is lower among Net users than non-users. In the U.S., users watch 5.2 fewer hours of television per week than non-users. (NYT, 1/29/04)

Last summer, a Manhattan movie theater aired a live soccer match between the Colorado Rapids and the Los Angeles Galaxy. Regal Entertainment Group is investing $70 million in digital projectors for about 4,900 screens. (USN&WR, 8/25/03)

OneWorld TV, a Web-based network of 1,250 nongovernment organizations created in 2002, invites participants to add footage to existing stories on various topics from around the world. (Utne, Aug 2003)

While South Korea has rightfully been called a broadband paradise, Japan is fast turning into one. In just two years, the number of broadband Internet connections has grown tenfold, to more than 10 million. (NYT, 5/5/03)

 Global data traffic is now more than 11 times higher than voice traffic – just three years ago they were even. (USN&WR, 1/13/03)

A three-year-old Internet newspaper in Korea, OhmyNews, relies mostly on contributions from ordinary readers all over the country. Only 20% of the paper each day is written by staff journalists. The paper averages about 14 million visits a day in a country of about 40 million people. (NYT, 3/6/03)

 The Dorchester, a luxury hotel in London, has on-staff technology butlers to assist guests with wireless high-speed Internet services. (NYT, 3/14/03)

Major League Baseball is Webcasting 1,000 games this year. (USA Today, 3/17/03)

Earthlink recently announced the first mainstream Internet telephony service aimed at consumers. For about $90 a month, customers can get unlimited high-speed Internet access and unlimited local and long-distance calls in the U.S. (USA Today, 3/14/03)

Among second graders at the Kulosaari Elementary School in Helsinki, the most fashionable object of desire is not a Barbie or a Power Ranger or other electronic toy. It is a Nokia cellphone, accessorized with a personal logo on the screen. (NYT, 10/24/02)

When high speed Wi-Fi service came to the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville, Md., Ernest Norris, 77, developed a new pastime: viewing real-time footage from cameras set up on mountains that allow him to bird-watch from the comfort of his swivel chair. (NYT, 11/27/02)

New Wi-Fi phones, expected to be available in the next year, will allow users to connect to Wi-Fi networks, which can be 100 times as fast as even relatively speedy cellular-data connections. The phones will be able to be used for everything from e-mailing and surfing the web and downloading music and video files to making voice calls. (WSJ, 2/19/03)

The city of Long Beach, Calif., will make free wireless Internet access available in its downtown area as part of an effort to attract visitors and companies to the business district. (NYT, 1/6/03)

Homeowners in Ruby Ranch, Colo., have set up the first subscriber-owned DSL co-op in the country. The initial subscribers paid $60 in monthly fees but the rates will drop as more people sign up. (Business 2.0, Aug 2002)

Although it is mostly used in urban areas, Wi-Fi can be transmitted over long distances. A group in the Canary Islands recently sent a signal across 70.5 km of ocean separating the islands of Tenerife and Gran Canaria. (FT, 10/27/02)

Con Edison and at least half a dozen other utilities are testing equipment that would deliver the Internet over the power grid. In Europe, several utilities already sell powerline Internet to thousands of customers. (USN&WR, 8/12/02)

In November, Italy’s national telecommunications company, Telecom Italia, began using the Internet to transport all calls between Rome and Milan. (Balt Sun, 12/8/02)

The total number of business and residential telephone lines declined in 2001 for the first time since the Depression. “It’s a behavioral shift from the last 100 years in which we called a geographical place and got a person. We’re now moving to a model of calling a person — regardless of geography. The consequences of such a change could be profound,” says telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan. (NYT, 8/29/02)

A new instant messaging program allows users of AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft’s MSN Messenger to add moving pictures to chats. With no advertising and only a few press reports, some 60,000 users signed up for the free Logitech software in just over three weeks. (USA Today, 8/19/02)

“In their candid moments everybody at the F.C.C. will tell you they are  being pressured quite severely by various forces that are quite concerned about Wi-Fi. They’re worried that it is really a trenching machine that will uproot the entrenched forces,” said Reed E. Hundt, a former chairman of the F.C.C. (NYT, 11/18/02)

Some telecom analysts say the supply of fiber is essentially infinite, thanks to Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing which can increase the capacity of each fiber by maybe 1,000 times. That brings about a first in economic history: “Infinite supply and a finite demand creates a price of near-zero,” says Dana Blankenhorn of A-Clue.com. (USA Today, 7/3/02)

New model auto radar detectors are interfering with small satellite data systems across the U.S., disrupting credit card transactions at gas pumps, Muzak systems in fast-food outlets and even stock trades. (USA Today, 6/17/02)

Police departments in Baltimore and Oakland, Calif., are using a new communication system that marries “Wi-Fi” — the high-speed, short-range wireless network — to a cellular data network with region-wide coverage. (Balt Sun, 6/20/02)

A small but growing number of Americans are wired directly to their medical records. Top teaching hospitals in Colorado and Massachusetts and a number of healthcare networks are testing or offering the service. (WSJ, 6/25/02)

A new phone service called Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is available in some markets around the country. Edison-N.J.-based Vonage Inc. is offering unlimited local and long-distance calls for $39.95 a month. Cable companies say they should be able to offer basic unlimited local plans for about $10. (Insight, 6/17/02)

Tired of waiting for high-speed Internet service, small towns across the country are installing their own broadband service for residents at rates that average $33 a month, at least 20% less than market prices. (Balt Sun, 3/10/02)

Moms who surf spend an average of 17 hours a week online, compared with 12 hours for teens, according to research conducted for AOL. (InfoWeek, 5/22/02)

International long-distance revenues in Latin America have fallen significantly, from $3 billion in 1997 to $2.5 billion this year. Internet phone service is not only more readily available than normal phone service, it's significantly cheaper, too: 5 to 10 cents a minute, vs. the $1 to $1.50 per minute charged by monopoly telephone providers. (Wash Post, 4/18/02)

In April, the Indian government authorized Internet telephony, or Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP). "Long distance goes away as a cost factor," said an official with VocalTec Communications, a Jerusalem-based leader in the VoIP software industry. (Reuters, 5/13/02)

Broadband, high-speed Internet service has caught on in South Korea faster than anyplace else in the world. With 13.9 users per 100 residents, it is well ahead of Canada (6.2), Sweden (4.5) and the United States (3.2). (NYT)

A German company called Biotronik has developed a pacemaker that faxes daily reports to the patient's doctor. (Reader's Digest)

A Taiwanese Web site is "renting" thousands of old movies for $1 apiece online. A buck buys three days of access to a streaming version of each movie in the RealVideo format. (Was Post)

In Aspen, Colo., a shoestring, wireless, high-speed Internet service allows anyone in a 45-square-mile area around the city with a computer and $120 plug-in card to surf the Web over the airwaves free at speeds 30 times as fast as with a standard modem. (WSJ)

Distributed-computing networks that use the excess processing power of thousands of PCs allow researchers to purchase computer time at a fraction of the cost of buying a supercomputer. "I think it's a first in the world of technology that companies are actually borrowing from the masses and reselling it to corporations," said a Yankee Group analyst. (NYT)

Wireless technology is contributing to the nation's electricity demand. According to one study, a Web-enabled Palm Pilot uses as much electricity as a heavy-duty refrigerator. (NYT)

Devices using the 802.11b open standard for wireless communication can carry data at up to 11 megabits per second - ten times faster than most cable modems. (USA Today)

At a small but growing number of colleges, the technology known as Internet Protocol telephony is being used to replace campus telephone networks. "We used to pay about $11,000 a month for our 100 administrative telephones," says the director of Information technology at Menlo College. "We pay about $1,000 now." (CHE)

A Bergen Airport in Norway, a Norwegian company recently installed a system that automatically shuts off travelers' cellphones before they enter the plane. (NYT)

The growth of text messaging in the Philippines is staggering - an estimated 100 million text messages clog the wireless networks each day. That puts the country well ahead of previous world leader Germany by 1 billion messages a month. (Forbes)

The annual Christmas bird census conducted by Cornell University is moving to the Internet. Pioneering bird counters are putting microphones on their roofs that are attached to their home computers that are linked to Cornell. These mics pick up "chip calls," which are the beeps many birds make when they migrate. (Wash Post)

The number of Verizon phone lines connected to homes and businesses has declined for the first time in the company's history. (Wash Post)

The city of Houston launched a program to offer free e-mail and use of personal computer software to its 3 million area residents. (USA Today)

In August, Internet consultant Jeremiah Grossman, 24, breached Hotmail filters and accessed ID and credit card data on Passport, Microsoft's free Web-based e-mail service, with just one line of code. (USA Today)

Ontario's Lakehead University is setting up a campus network that university and telephone-company officials say will be the largest in North America to carry voice conversations using a basic Internet networking standard. (CHE)

Multicast Media Networks has developed the world's first software protocol that allows computers to accept real-time broadcast quality video delivered via the Internet. (Wireless Age)

About two-thirds of young people online ages 9 to 17 have a contact list or buddy list, according to an AOL study. (Cox)

Equifax recently launched a daily credit-monitoring service that will immediately alert you by e-mail whenever an inquiry is made on your credit file or a new account is opened under your name. (USN&WR)

In Littleton, Colo., a company called Continental Divide Robotics is about to offer an AI system that can locate any person or object anywhere in the world and notify the user if that person or object breaks out of a certain set of rules. (USA Today)

When Amazon.com and BN.com offered Stephen King's novel "Riding the Bullet" free of charge, customers downloaded an estimated 500,000 copies within days. But a market study later found that only 5% of people read it. (Wash Post)

When Beazer Homes USA was ready to roll out a 30-home subdivision in Sacramento earlier this year, it didn't bother building model homes. Prospective buyers went to Beazer's Web site to take a virtual tour of the models. The project was sold out in a matter of days. (IBD)

Lower-income Americans who use the Net from home are growing faster than any other income group. (USA Today)

First Health Group, a health plan in Downers Grove, Ill., has started offering a cash incentive to doctors who communicate by e-mail with chronically ill patients. And Kaiser Permanente lets patients schedule appointments or ask questions of nurses via e-mail. (WSJ)

Baen Books, a small science fiction publisher,is finding that the more e-texts it makes available cheaply or for free on its web site, the more it has been able to sell its most expensive offerings. "We're drifting from being a paperback house to a hardcover one because of the net," Mr.Baen said. (NYT)

In an undisclosed Northern European country, a new "Dial-a-Coke" program allows consumers to dial a toll-free number listed on 100 machines to charge their soft drinks. (IW)

Guardian IT, a technology firm now building Europe's largest web-hosting center, near London, has decided to build its own 24MW power station because the grid could not meet its requirements. (Economist)

Computing devices with a peer-to-peer networking address (such as Napster and Instant Messaging) now outnumber computing devices with a standard Internet address by an order of magnitude. In hard numbers, that's the equivalent of nearly 200 million P2P addresses versus 23 million DNS addresses. (Silicon Alley News)

After Zagat, the restaurant review service, opened its own website, sales of its printed guidebooks increased 70%. (Business 2.0)

Johns Hopkins University has opened the Information Security Institute, a $10 million research center devoted to computer-age security issues. The institute is modeled after MIT's well-known Media Lab. (Sun)

Colorado and Wisconsin now have web sites that allow anyone, anywhere to conduct statewide searches of court records ranging from traffic violations to murder cases. Some counties, including Maricopa in Arizona, have Internet links that provide instant access to records traditionally available only at local courthouses. (Sun)

A new portal service for the federal government, FirstGov, will be capable of searching 500 million Web pages in a quarter of a second. The portal should be able to handle 100 million such searches daily. (CHE)

Buses in San Francisco are being outfitted with Global Positioning Systems. Their locations can be checked on cellphones and other Net devices. (USA Today)

In 1999, the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore recorded 2 million downloads from its collection of 2,800 electronic books - more than the library's circulation of print books for the first time. (Sun)

A growing number of retailers, including the toy seller F.A.O. Schwarz and the Canal Jean Company in Manhattan, have installed cameras to send images from their stores over the Internet. Gallery Furniture in Houston has 48 cameras throughout its 90,000-square-foot showroom. (NYT)

Half of the world's population - more than three billion people - have yet to make their first telephone call. (Vital Speeches)

By the end of this year, any e-mail to or from a friend or business in England can be read by a British intelligence agent at M15 headquarters in London. (CSM)

The number of calls into telemarketing centers now exceeds the number made out to prospects' homes. (Wash Post)

Eighteen states now broadcast audio or video of their legislative sessions on the Internet. (AP)

Last fall, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Austin, Texas, became the first U.S. airport to offer laptop travelers wireless access to the Internet from anywhere in its 600,000-square-foot terminal. (USA Today)

Last November, a team of university and industry researchers rigged the first 2.5-gigabit-per-second Internet connection - setting a new Net speed record - using only off-the-shelf servers and networking equipment, and standard TCP/IP protocols. For perspective, that connection is more than 1,500 times faster than a T1 line. (Business 2.0)

In May, the president of Costa Rica announced the launch of free e-mail service and limited internet access for all Costa Ricans. (USA Today)

A new law in Britain grants special privileges to foreign pets implanted with silicon ID chips. If the chip indicates a pet's vaccines are up to date, the animal can come into the country without the usual six-month quarantine. (CSM)

Cisco Systems is pioneering the "virtual close": the ability because of Internet connectivity to close the financial books of a company with a one-hour notice. Forty percent of the visits to Cisco are now chief financial officers and chief executive officers asking how to do the virtual close. (USA Today)

"I foresee shoppers walking through Wal-Mart with their connected Palm Pilots, comparing prices with other stores even as they walk down the aisles," said Peter Zandan, a founder of an Internet start-up called Zilliant. (NYT)

In a test an experimental heart monitoring system, the Chronicle, doctors are implanting tiny monitors inside the hearts of 120 patients to painlessly record every twinge, 24 hours a day. Patients sit in front of a wireless transmitter at home for five minutes a day while the monitor beams the recordings into a secure Web site. (AP)

Nordstrom Inc. will start selling shoes via the Web, offering 20 million pairs of shoes at www.nordstromshoes.com. (IBD)

"We've had problems with information getting out and heard horror stories from other schools. Sometimes this stuff is out there a half-hour after practice." - The University of Colorado sports information director on the rapid spread of practice and game plan information on sports Web sites. (Bloomberg)

KnowledgeMail is a system that creates and maintains profiles of employees and their areas of expertise as revealed by their e-mail messages. It captures outbound messages, extracts keywords, and uses those terms to build or update employee profiles. (IW)

Powerline telecommunications technology (PLT) offers cheap, fast access to Web services via existing electricity networks. Currently available PLT products can transmit data rates at up to 1MB per second - nearly 20 times faster than standard 55Kb modems. (FT)

The first of 200 solar-powered schoolhouses equipped with a computer that can be linked to the Internet via satellite is now operating in rural Cambodia. The panels provide enough energy to run the computer for four to five hours a day. (Bangkok Post)

Goodwill Industries has opened an online auction site - www.shopgoodwill.com - where it offers some of its most valuable donated goods. (Wash Post)

"Privacy in general in the U.S. is a fallacy. To be honest, I don't have an expectation of privacy online. With a little bit of work, detectives or a legitimate business can find out almost everything about you online in perfectly legal ways. Almost all credit card information, for instance, is public info," says Ron Moritz, the chief technology officer of Finjan software. (CSM)

The Comfort Inn-Airport hotel near Baltimore is one of the first hotels in the country to have personal computers with free, high-speed Internet access in all of its rooms. (Capital)

BP Amoco will be installing new gasoline pumps that include Web browsers and the Windows CE operating system. (WSJ)

Last summer, the Orange County Courthouse in Florida broadcast a murder trial on its website - the first time a local U.S. court has aired its own proceedings live on the Internet. (FT)

"The consumption of bandwidth is growing so fast, between now and 2001,we will have to build as much long distance capacity into U.S. networks as has ever been installed to date. Three years after that we'll double it again," says John Roth, CEO of Nortel. (Forbes)

"Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armoured car to deliver credit-card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench." - Professor Gene Spafford of Purdue University commenting on the disparity between data transaction security and the security of the client and server software. (www.sdmagazine.com)

In the first wedding on the Internet, a couple in Hollidaysburg, Pa., was married in the town's First Baptist Church by Jerry Falwell, who was 280 miles away in Lynchburg, Va. Guests in the pews watched while "virtual guests" watched by computer. The ceremony is saved in a file on the couple's web site (www.twobecomeone.com). (ReligionToday)

Pennsylvania has contracted with a online auction company, FreeMarkets Online Inc., to purchase supplies ranging from coal to office supplies - the first state to purchase via online auction. (IW)

Farmers Insurance Group, the nation's third-largest home and auto insurer, is installing an integrated electronic claims system accessible via the Web. Customers will be able to file claims over the Web or by phone. (IW)

Online gambling is a $535 million industry that is expected to grow to $10 billion in three years, according to a London market research firm. An estimated 200 web sites offer slot machines, craps and other Vegas-style games. (Computerworld)

The new super-fast Abilene Network connects more than three dozen research universities at speeds 45,000 times faster than the best telephone modems. (AP)

A new report from the Pew Research Center found that weather had overtaken technology as the subject of most interest to internet users. Most new web users last year were female between the ages of 30 and 40. (FT)

A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers says that in the next two years the amount of data carried over the world's telecom infrastructure will exceed that of voice. (IW)

The Department of Defense will test an Internet voting system in the 2000 general election. Five states - Florida, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas and Utah - will participate in the pilot project which will allow Americans living overseas, both military and civilian, to cast ballots by using the Internet. (NYT)

E-mail is now available to the crews of U.S. Navy ships on deployment. "It's been my simplest deployment in 28 years because of e-mail," said Capt. Edward J. Fahy, skipper of the carrier John F. Kennedy. His crew sent 2 million e-mail messages on a recent six-month Mediterranean cruise. (Capital)

"The Net is the ultimate word-of-mouth vehicle. . . . Recently, while car-shopping, I posted requests for recommendations and warnings about the car dealers in my area. The consistency of responses amazed me. When five different individuals write to praise dealer X and five others write to complain about dealer Y, then the information becomes compelling." - From a letter-to-the-editor of Business Week.

Metal Exchange Inc. (www.metalexehange.net) is the first independent company to invite metal traders to an electronic auction for commodities. The Pittsburgh-based exchange is one of the first Internet sites where companies in the same industry have joined forces for the creation of Web-based trading. (JOC)

Internet chat rooms in Beijing, China, are now analyzing the various visa officers at the American Embassy. An increasing number of Chinese are being refused visas to the United States. Some chat-room users think ethnicity plays a role in the refusal rate. (WSJ)

John Gilmore, a self-taught computer programmer, built a supercomputer for $220,000 with cryptography researcher Paul Kocher to break the government’s "gold standard" of encryption, a feat that government officials claimed was impossible. Their computer cracked the code in 56 hours of work. (USA Today)

During the Whitbread Round the World Race, nearly a million people from 177 countries checked in at the Whitbread Web site each day. (Newsweek)

Investors around the world are joining a class action against a British bank, Halifax PLC. Organizers are calling it the first class-action suit orchestrated via the World Wide Web. (Wash Post)

In March. a Web site called The Sync (www.thesync.com) made available a 110-minute black-and-white film called "Walls of Sound" — one of the first contemporary films to be presented in its entirety at a Web site. (NYT)

Some San Francisco-area ham radio operators. frustrated with the local telephone company. have begun their own alternative nonprofit carrier using high-capacity microwaves to beam phone calls and Web pages directly into their homes. (NYT)

The chairman of Objectsoft. a New Jersey computer company. depends on e-mail alerts to find bargain fares to Seattle. "Sometimes the fare is $300; at other times, it’s $1,200. We warehouse the tickets when they’re cheap, and pay the $50 change fee. These sorts of services are going to become ubiquitous," said David Sarna. (NYT)

More than 1,100 radio stations are now broadcasting 24 hours a day over the Internet. (InternetWeek)

More than 50% of all worldwide traffic on the Internet passes through Northern California. (NYT)

Realtors in Maryland are now able to renew their licenses electronically 24 hours a day - the first online licensing project in the country. During the next two years, the project will be extended to contractors, engineers, cosmetologists, accountants and other professionals overseen by the state. (Sun)

Washington, D.C. publisher, National Academy Press, posted the full text of 1,700 of its current titles on the Internet. The next year its sales increased by 17%. (Wash Post)

More than a third of all Internet searches are health related. (USN&WR)

Technology which will allow computer users to buy postage through the Internet and then print the postage on envelopes is being tested by the Postal Service. (Wash Post)

If you read the New York Times on the Internet, the paper is telling advertisers your income, age, Zip code, credit card habits and what kind of computer you use. (Wash Post)

The Internet may be fast becoming the world's largest unregulated pharmacy. "It's the Wild West out there. . . . The problem is that [selling drugs on the World Wide Web] does not respect existing laws and regulations issued for across-border sale and mailing of medicines," says a WHO official. (CSM)

With more than half of the town's 37,000 residents using the Internet, Blacksburg, Virginia, is, on a per capita basis, one of the world's most wired places. "It may sound silly, but e-mail is the thing everyone here uses the most," said the town's Internet manager. Community organizations have noticed an increase in attendance at their meetings after starting electronic mailing lists. (Wash Post)

The world's largest book retailer, Barnes & Noble, recently opened a Web site on the Internet (www.barnesandnoble.com). It plans to offer deeper discounts there than in its stores - 30% off every hardcover and 20% off every paperback. (IW)

The Tragically Hip, one of Canada's biggest bands, will not sell its new album, Live Between Us, in U.S. record stores. The CD can be ordered only on the Web at Music Boulevard or by calling an 800 number. (USA Today)

London's Business Systems International has sold the name business.com to an undisclosed Texas buyer for $150,000. (IW)

Technology Funding, a San Mateo, Calif. venture capital fund, has permission to market a $100 million private limited partnership over the Internet, the first fund of its kind offered online. (BW)

Prudential Real Estate Investors is selling a portfolio of six warehouses around the country over the Web site Realbid - "the first serious attempt by institutional investors to use the Internet," says Peter Pike, founder of the PikeNet commercial real-estate directory. (WSJ)

The founder of Amsterdam-based DigiCash says that its encryption technolgy makes financial transactions so private that it can't track how customers spend their money. (WSJ)

During the Gulf War, computer vandals working from Eindhoven in the Netherlands cracked into U.S. government computers at 34 military sites to steal information about troop movements, missile capabilities, and other secret information; they offered it to the Iraquis, but the Iraquis rejected it because they considered the information a hoax. (London Telegraph)

This fall, Maryland will be the first state to have customized World Wide Webs sites for each of its school districts. (NYT)

A study by Pacific Telesis of one 24-mile diameter area found 16% of local calls did not connect, due mainly to high Internet usage. Historically, less than 1% of calls don't connect. (USA Today)

Last fall, the Maryland-Duke football game was carried on the World Wide Web with full video and audio - the first live North American sports video transmission on the Internet. (Wash Times)

American and Delta are among the first companies in any industry to offer tangible incentives to consumers who do business with them on the Web. Frequent flyers are offered a 500-mile bonus for every round-trip booked via the Web. (IW)

"We've been amazed at how many people will actually complete orders with no humans," says Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Computers. (WSJ)

Nissan will start selling cars on the Internet this summer - the first Japanese car maker to announce such plans. Nissan intends to sell "Internet cars" less expensively by cutting promotion costs. (WSJ)

Village Volvo in Bel Air, Md., now sells 30% of its cars through the Internet. According to J.D. Power & Associates, 2.2 million of the 15.1 million light vehicles sold last year were sold by computer. (Sun)

During last year's blizzard on the East Coast, many people stayed home and tried to telecommute. The daytime telephone usage profile during that week was like Mother's Day at two in the afternoon. (The Red Herring)

A group of 34 universities has agreed to create a new national network for higher education, to be called Internet II, which will offer higher speeds and more reliable service than the current Internet. (NYT)

A survey of 205 companies, mostly Fortune 1,000 firms, found that 58% of them had had outsiders try to misuse their computer systems during the past year. "What surprised me is that e-mail and documents are a big target and that people are admitting it. That people are admitting it is what surprised me the most," said a vice president for War Room Research Ltd. (Sun)

Spring Street Brewing Co. posted a page on the World Wide Web to facilitate the buying and selling of its stock. The New York brewery also launched an initial public offering on the Internet, raising $1.6 million without the use of underwriters. (WSJ)

StreamWorks server software from Xing Technology can deliver live video and audio over the Internet. A bare bones server package runs just $3,500. (Wash Post)

"While real-estate agents used to live by the adage 'location, location, location,' they are now starting to say 'connection, connection, connection.'" - Real-estate developer Terry Hui on the demand for high-speed computer networks. (WSJ)

Temple News, the 75-year-old student newspaper of Temple University, has gone completely digital, giving up it's daily run of 10,000 newsprint copies. (Wired)

During a U.S. Navy exercise last fall, an air force captain armed only with a store-bought computer and modem was able to penetrate the command and control systems of all the ships in the battle group. (Sunday Telegraph)

One of the nation's largest photo retailers, Wolf Camera & Video, is starting a service that lets customers drop off film for finishing and then view their pictures on the Internet, as well as electronically order reprints and enlargements and send copies to relatives in other states. (WSJ)

A doctor at a community health clinic in Wayne, West Virginia is planning to put his patients' medical records on the World Wide Web. (WSJ)

British Airways plans to become the first company in the world to make daily television broadcasts to its staff across the world. (FT)

A talk radio station in Dallas, KLIF, put its entire transmission on the Internet last fall, mainly hoping to reach workers in glass-and steel downtown buildings that have trouble receiving AM signals. But now KLIF's talk shows routinely get callers from other states and Europe. (AP)

Some innovators are testing ways to transform the Internet into a personal two-way TV station. The Multicast Backbone, or MBone, links about 1,500 computers with primitive audio-video capability. "It's not radio, it's not TV, it's something new - your users can reach out and touch you," says the president of Internet Multicasting Service. AP)

"Internet has become an anomaly in the telecommunications world because cost is not related to distance." - Louise Kehoe in the Financial Times.

Desktop radio software for $99 from Progressive Networks in Seattle turns a PC into an Internet radio station. (FT)

"A noted scientist who has used the Internet for several years recently commented that the 'Net' is becoming so congested with traffic and garbage from nutcases that he has begun to use telephone and the U.S. Postal Service again." (Letter-to-the-Editor of Forbes ASAP)

Free World Dialup (http://www.pulver.com/) made its first successful free call over the Internet last October between a computer using IPHone software and an ordinary phone subscriber. The call was placed between Tokyo and Jakarta. (FT)

AT&T Paradyne is introducing a new technology called GlobeSpan that makes it possible to squeeze 6 Mbps of data through ordinary copper phone lines. (Wired)

Futurist Alvin Toffler has given up his e-mail address. He was flooded with so many messages he couldn't do his work. (Union Tribune)

At Camp Chi, near Lake Delton, Wis., anywhere from 50 to 100 e-mail messages and about 100 faxes for campers arrived each day last summer. A YMCA official said that "one of our problems is that kids bring cellular phones to camp. Some bring pagers."(WSJ)

According to Professor Martin Hellman of Stanford University,computing power is now so cheap that it costs only $1 to search one billion words for interesting contents. (Financial Times)

In the first three months of Time-Warner’s interactive trail in Orlando, the two most popular services were ordering stamps and letting the post office know when to pick-up a package. (Financial Times)

Southwest Airlines expects to become the first airline to let passengers buy airline tickets on personal computers. (USA Today)

A pilot who helped rescue Capt. Scott O’Grady in Bosnia later described the mission to military friends via e-mail. Within hours, sensitive (but not secret) details - including pilot code names, radio frequencies and weapons information - were available to 3 million America Online subscribers. (Wash Post)

"I expect to see the Internet equivalent of a dial tone for$5 a month or less by next year (1996). The volumes are increasing at a phenomenal rate," said a spokesman for Intel. (NYT)

@Home, a Palo-Alto based venture funded by TCI and Kleiner, Perkins,plans to deliver a 10-Mbit connection which is about 80 times faster than an ISDN line, for a flat monthly fee. (Wired)

'The ability to reach out worldwide instantly, without prints or electronic censoring by hostile governments, is a wonderful tool,' says George A. Hughes, president of a Baltimore printing company. His company designed on-line 'wanted' posters for the Libyan terrorists indicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. (Sun)

Rock star Patrick Moraz recently booked an entire tour through the Internet, eliminating agents, promoters and other middlemen in the process. (AP)

Southern Co., the giant Atlanta-based utility has about 2,000 miles of its own fiber-optic cable in place and the capacity for two-way communication with nearly 3.5 million customers, making it the nation's second-largest telecommunications company. (WSJ)

The ABC and National Public Radio networks plan to make their newscasts available on the Internet using RealAudio software developed by Progressive Networks of Seattle.

'As human-to-human communications become increasingly asynchronous, time will be meaningless (five hours of music will be delivered to you in less than five seconds). Distance is irrelevant: New York to London is only five miles further than New York to Newark via satellite.' Nicholas Negroponte in Wired)

Federal Express packages can now be tracked directly by customers on the company's World Wide Web site on the Internet. (Newsweek)

Using a cable modem, a computer user can download in 1.2 seconds computer data that would take 20 minutes to transmit via phone. (USA Today)

'The Net's two-way. You don't have to be one of the traditional gatekeepers - you don't have to be a journalist or an editor or publisher or broadcaster. You can be anybody. When you combine the many-to-many aspect and the people connecting due to their interests, those are really the building blocks of what I call virtual community.' - Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community(AP)

MBone, short for Multicast Backbone, is a subset of the Internet capable of 'multicasting.' MBone is entirely interactive and broadcasts over the MBone are free. Recently, doctors in London and Sweden watched as a surgeon in San Francisco performed a complex liver operation. As he worked, viewers asked questions about the procedure. (Newsweek)

Phoenix lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel advertised their immigration services on thousands of bulletin boards last spring. As a result, they generated $100,000 in new business, they say. 'Anybody even operating a business out of their home truly can reach millions of people around the world for a cost that is so insignificant that it might as well be free,' says Mr. Canter. (CSM)

Last year, a message from Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt to the White House became the first e-mail correspondence from one head of government to another. (Wired)

Within three weeks of an Internet message sent by students at Swarthmore College and Claremont College, a one-day protest of Proposition 187 was held on 20 campuses. 'This is the first time I've seen a national protest organized so quickly,' said a professor at Swarthmore. (Knight-Ridder)

In January, for the first time, business computer hosts on the Internet outnumbered those at educational institutions. (Financial Times)

'Almost overnight, the elimination of sending costs has reversed the fundamental economies of communication. With costly transmission no longer limiting the message supply, it is message demand - the attention span of recipients - that is today's scarce resource.' - Michael Rothschild in Forbes ASAP.

Zenith is one of several companies supplying modems that allow computers to link directly to cable systems. Its Homeworks system is being used by Cox Cable to deliver Prodigy service in San Diego at a rate 52 times faster than existing 9,600-baud phone modems. (Forbes ASAP)

Last fall, the Rolling Stones broadcast 20 minutes of live audio and video on the Internet. A little known band called Severe Tire Damage broadcast an impromptu performance from the Xerox PARC offices in Palo Alto directly before and after the Stones appearance. (NYT)

McDonald's Manhattan Delivery Service links 40 restaurants to single computerized clearinghouse. Orders will be delivered by the restaurant closest to the customer. (NYT)

'It's not about one-to-many publishing any longer. In the end the digital revolution is coming from the bottom up.' - The publisher of Wired on the magazine's policy of allowing free on-line access and retrieval of back issues and articles. The magazine receives approximately 100,000 on-line queries a week. (NYT)

A California company is offering license plate frames with the Internet address of your choice. (InfoWeek)

Aerosmith recently issued a previously unavailable song on the Compuserve network - the first major rock band to release a song exclusively via computer. (USN&WR)

In July, Maryland became the first state to offer its residents direct connections to the Internet for free. (Wash Post)

Shoppers at Giant Food stores in Maryland can now pick up USAir, American Airlines and Amtrack tickets from ATM-like machines while doing their weekly shopping. (Warfield's)

Working with a dozen other organizations to test what's called Project Northstar, Avis has equipped 60 cars with wireless technology that lets drivers consult a local expert who has a database full of maps, restaurants, gas stations, the latest traffic conditions, and even a direct line to the police. (InfoWeek)

The first radio station on the Internet plans to begin broadcasting 24 hours a day in January, including live gavel-to-gavel audio broadcasts from the House and Senate floors. The Internet Multicasting Company will be the digital equivalent of the C-Span cable network. (NYT)