Power Play
With more than two dozen states deregulating energy, GreenMountain.com CEO Dennis Kelly is hoping to sell folks on choosing power from renewable resources - and letting them review their energy consumption and pay their bills online. Already operating in California and Pennsylvania, GreenMountain.com launches this March in New Jersey. But skeptics abound: An IPO was aborted last summer when investors complained the company wasn't a true dot-com play. And while GreenMountain.com does deliver energy from cleaner sources into regional power grids, most of the juice going into customers' homes is still from nonrenewable sources.
Kelly is planning to go public later this year, though, saying, "We know there are enough consumers who give a damn about the environment to make this work."
Sort Stories
How do you categorize 1.4 million sites in 58 languages? The answer: Netscape's Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org), an open source effort that aims to do for Web indexing what Linux did for operating systems. Library scientist Gwinn Bruns oversees the drive to produce a truly comprehensive human-edited Web directory and offer the info free to search engines.
As the project's chief taxonomist, Bruns has final say over how to categorize the Web's labyrinth of topics. There are 200,000-plus categories, "but no scientific formula," says Bruns, who relies on the collective wisdom of more than 20,000 volunteer editors. "Sometimes,"she says, "I even ask Mom."
Unlimited Access
"Disabling people in cyberspace is a design decision," contends Betsy Macken. Macken founded Stanford's Archimedes Project (www-csli.stanford.edu/arch/index.html), which teaches engineers how to build access for the disabled into computer design - and creates product prototypes of its own. Among the Archimedes beta devices is a computer program that graphically represents American Sign Language and an eye-tracking system that allows people who are paralyzed to control a PC just by looking at the screen. "As soon as a person can navigate in cyberspace, the disability goes away," Macken says. "All that matters is what they do with their ideas."
Head Hunter
garageband.com, a music reviews clearinghouse cofounded in September by former Talking Heads keyboardist Jerry Harrison, has a good hook: Find and sign undiscovered musicians. Bands upload MP3s of their own to the site, and users - many of them fellow performers - vote on tunes. Each monthly winner receives a $250,000 recording contract; garageband.com becomes the group's label and gets a cut of the profits. The first virtual battle-of-the-bands champ, boondogs, is a group from Little Rock, Arkansas. "We're going to find music in places that would not have been discovered otherwise," says Harrison, himself a native of Milwaukee.
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