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By James E. Powell and Lori L. Bloomer
The key to successful Internet usage is a good search engine. And the key to a good search engine, apparently, is a merger.
First, Yahoo agreed to add Digital Equipment's AltaVista search engine to the list of tools available to its Web site visitors.Yahoo will first peruse its own 260,000-plus sites; if the user needs to search further, he or she can call on AltaVista by clicking on a button from within Yahoo, and those results are returned in the same format used by Yahoo.
Meanwhile, rival engine Excite had a merger of its own with Magellan, yet another product/service in this category. Under this agreement, the Magellan On-Line Guide will be included in Excite's database, and the two companies themselves will merge into a single entity under the Excite name.
By Jim Forbes
It's been a long time coming, but a new generation of videoconferencing hardware and software is sparking consumer interest.
Unlike past standards, which often required local area networks or other specialized links, this initiative builds on a common communications tool: the phone. New technology that compresses unwieldy video and audio files makes it possible to use phone lines and a new generation of 28.8Kbps (or faster) modems for videoconferencing.
All this has vendors scrambling to make sure they don't get left behind. Chip giant Intel and Creative Labs are two of the companies getting behind the push.
"We think there is a lot of pent-up demand for videoconferencing products," said Intel manager David Nash, but they have to reach consumer price points first. As is the case with "network computers" and hand-held machines, observers say the magic number is $500. OEMs such as Compaq could ship affordable PCs with videoconferencing technology as early as next spring.
Still, other pieces of the puzzle have yet to fall into place. For example, many of today's products don't have multi-vendor capability. The current drive is to make sure that new releases will work not only through common phone lines but across systems from different vendors.
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