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Each weekend we highlight the most relevant stories Wired News has covered in the last seven days. To find out what's coming up, jump to The Week Ahead.
Something for nothing: The search for viable business models in the topsy-turvy Net economy had companies on both sides of the Atlantic announcing more freebies this week. In the United States, the focus was on hardware. In the United Kingdom, Net access.
First up, New Hampshire-based PC Free said it will include a fully rigged PC, color printer, and software with your Net connection for US$40 a month. The five-employee outfit sees blue skies ahead. "There are 38 million homes in the US without Net access," said the founder. "We aim to get half."
Overseas, Richard Branson's Virgin Group said it will offer free Internet access. This is a setup that's failing in the United States, but thriving in Britain. One reason: UK telephone carriers have to give ISPs a slice of their revenues.
Sometimes, though, free is too good to be true. Craig Bicknell took a closer look at the company behind the iMac giveaway and found a most checkered past.
Give me the money: Linux lovers marched on Microsoft's offices, demanding refunds for their unopened and unused Windows software. Microsoft politely refused, but what a scene. "Only in Silicon Valley would a parade of mostly men in matching white-penguin-emblazoned T-shirts and bearing slogans like 'Got Source?' be recognized as a grassroots movement of free software evangelists," reported Judy DeMocker.
MP3 rolls on: More signs this week that the music-compression format is succeeding. GoodNoise made a deal to sell several They Might Be Giants albums over the Net -- including a new one with previously unreleased material. And Noisebox.com said it's planning the MP3 Music Awards, open to any artist who distributes songs over the Net.
Chips ahoy: The Pentium III set sail, a US$300 million marketing breeze filling its sails. You probably saw the ads during Friends and Frasier the other night. Why the hard sell? Analysts say Intel needs to make inroads into the consumer market.
Sony, meanwhile, created a stir just by talking about its multimedia super chip, a 128-bit piece of work featuring built-in hardware for decoding 3-D graphics and digital video. Sony wasn't saying, but at least one industry watcher speculated it could do the work of three or four add-on cards.
Tough crowd: Dell gave Wall Street the profit it wanted to see, but revenues fell short of expectations. Hewlett-Packard told a similar story. With that heavyweight pair pointing the way, markets sagged.
Their own Sundance: Consolidation has made it tough for independent game developers to get industry attention. Enter the Independent Games Festival, where "the guys banging out code in a garage somewhere [get] a chance to show off."
Geek raunch: The world's first cypherpunk porn flick, Cryptic Seduction, was screened in Oakland, California. Joyce Slaton was there as "a voluminous money shot extracted a fervent, 'Buffer overflow!' from the crowd."
On trial: Compaq stood at the center of the US v. Microsoft slugfest this week, once Microsoft blundered through another videotape snafu. The world's largest computer maker was brought in to dispute the notion that Microsoft bullied competitors and partners, but things didn't quite turn out that way.
The crumbling state of Microsoft's case brought forth more talk -- first from a thinly sourced newspaper article, then an industry-group study -- about what to do after the software giant loses.
Digital ACLU: James Glave talked to a lot of people about Tara Lemmey, the tech and marketing whiz named to head the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The unanimous view: Great woman, great choice.
Hard numbers: Not a prediction, projection, or extrapolation. No, Network Wizards actually counted the number of Internet hosts. Forty-three million, they tallied. That means the Net continues to grow at an annual rate of 46 percent.
Name game: Network Solutions tried to put the squeeze on domain-name speculators, restricting access to a key database. But some registration companies cried foul, saying the move could put them out of business.
Med-Tech: An artificial skin developed to treat venous leg ulcers may help burn victims, too, doctors said. And a new method of zapping tumors could offer breast-cancer patients an alternative to mastectomy.
Another healthy development: WebMD will do content for CNN's health page. Better yet for WebMD, CNN will include pointers to the medical-news portal with all its health stories -- on the tube and on the Web.
Write on: New York state is throwing the book at a scam Net-based literary agency, but many writers already knew to beware of the outfit. Its shady ways had been exposed in the newsgroup misc.writing.
Talk on: People reading their favorite poems -- that's US poet laureate Robert Pinksy's cool way of boosting the art form. Even cooler, it's happening on the Web. __THE WEEK AHEAD __
22 February: When Shaper Image announced last month that it would add an auction house to its online offerings, its stock shot up 67 percent. Now we'll see what happens when the site launches.
22 to 25 February, San Francisco: BancBoston Robertson Stephens unravels the mysteries of tech-sector investing at Technology 99.
23 to 24 February, New York: Silicon Alley 99 says it will focus on "e-commerce, consolidation, content creation, e-markets, personalization, intelligent agents, convergence and broadband applications, community, and MP3's effect on the music industry." All that in just two days!
23 to 25 February, Palm Springs, California: After three months of winter, Intel's Developer Forum in the desert sounds mighty fetching.
23 to 25 February, Scottsdale, Arizona: Another warm-climate junket comes courtesy of the Antitrust Section of the American Bar Association. They ask the pertinent question: Is antitrust relevant to high-tech industries?
26 to 28 February, Philadelphia: Alternative medicine has made inroads, but mainstream practitioners continue to view it with suspicion, if not outright contempt. This conference vows to bring objective scientific analysis into the picture.
