Tuesday, April 13

Zoom Telephonics has acquired many of the assets of Hayes Corporation, including many of their brand names, physical assets, and all the assets of Hayes Europe. The cost of the purchase was reported to be US$ 5.3 million. Hayes went bankrupt and ceased operations in March.

AOL CEO Steve Case will speak to Congress next week in an attempt to encourage laws that would allow AOL and other Internet service providers to sell Internet access over cable networks owned by other companies.

Freeserve, the free UK Internet service provider, may take its stock public.

Intelliquis is giving away Lucent 56K modems with the purchase of its TotalFax software. The software has a suggested retail price of $69.95.

Next Generation looks at the essential elements to making online console gaming a success.

Ericsson is purchasing router manufacturer Torrent Networking Technologies for US$ 450 million.

Cisco will pay US$ 2 billion for GeoTel, a company that makes call routing software.

Not enough RAM on your Rio? Diamond Multimedia now has a Rio PMP300 Special Edition MP3 player. The new Rio has 64 megabytes of RAM - twice the amount of the previous version - and a transparent Bondi blue case that resembles the iMac.

---

Friday, April 16

Privacy advocates are concerned about a feature in Internet Explorer 5.0 that informs a web site when a user bookmarks one of their pages.

There ain't no such thing as a free computer (TANSTAAFC)

The San Jose Mercury News looks at three more companies offering free computers. The companies make their money by charging monthly fees for Internet access.

Encanto Networks is offering free web servers. Customers get the servers free, but pay $69.95 per month for connection charges and must sign a two-year contract. The e.go web servers have a ship date of June 1, 1999.

Adspider is taking a different approach to providing cheap computers. The company offers notebooks at ridiculously low prices - $799 for a 300 MHz Pentium II notebook with a 13.3 inch TFT screen. Using something called SoftStream technology, users can interact with software that isn't installed on the computer. Adspider expects revenues from SoftStream to compensate for the reduced hardware prices. The company's web site is thin on details, but a press release provides an overview of the concept. The notebooks aren't expected to ship until May 10, 1999.

See also:

• There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL)
• There ain't no such thing as a free web page (TANSTAAFWP)

Previous week