CLEVELAND FREE-NET
The nation's first free community on-line service has announced that it will close on October 1st, a victim of Y2K. It was decided that there it lacked sufficient time or people necessary to rewrite the code. The site provides text-based access to the Internet, free of charge for registered users. It currently has 7,000 users, down from over 10,000 at its peak.

The Cleveland Free-Net was started in 1986 as an experiment by a professor to see what would happen when the average person had free access to the Internet. Since its beginning, it has been supported by Case Western Reserve University. (Source: www.excite.com, 8/5/1999).

HOME NETWORKS
By the 2005, 21% of the U.S. households and 19% in Europe will use wired or wireless technologies to connect over 150 million devices within the home. The study predicts most homes will use the Bluetooth wireless standard instead of the traditional wired method of connecting the devices together. Bluetooth, supported by over 800 companies worldwide, allows computers, printers, mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA) and even refrigerators to communicate with each other within a radius of 30 feet.

The study's author, David Mercer works for Strategy Analytics, an U.K. based telecommunications analysis firm. (Source: Infoworld, 7/26/1999).

SEARCH ENGINES
Yahoo continues to be the most popular search engine according to a survey of U.S. Internet users conducted by Decision Analyst, Inc. 32.8% picked Yahoo as their first choice, followed by Alta Vista (8.6%), Netscape (6.9%), Excite (8.4%), InfoSeek (8.0%), America OnLine (7.7%), HotBot (3.8%), Lycos (4.6%), Metacrawler (3.0%) and Dogpile (3.5%). (Source: Computerworld, 7/12/1999).

WEB SITE OF THE MONTH
This month's selection is TheSync www.thesync.com. This site can safely be classified as one of those "you'll find it only on the Internet" sites. It has a growing number of short videos and documentaries made exclusively for viewing on the Internet, plus interviews and several regularly scheduled shows. The site also features full-length movies such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Reefer Madness." Viewing the videos and movies in the 3-inch by 3-inch RealPlayer window can be tedious after awhile. Viewing the videos requires that you have a copy of RealPlayer which can downloaded for free at www.realplayer.com. (Source: Wall Street Journal, 8/5/1999).
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Technology Tidbits is published monthly by Jerry Price, Eau Claire, Wisconsin © 1999 Jerry W. Price

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