GROUP STRIVES TO SET E-BOOK STANDARDS - a group of publishers, software makers and electronics manufacturers have pledged to work together to set technical standards for electronic books. Supporters of include: Microsoft, SoftBook Press, Bertelsmann, HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster, and Time-Warner Books. The standards are based on HTML and XML coding systems. Publishers are attracted to the e-book, because of the savings on printing and distribution costs, and also because they could include more illustrations, charts and even raw data - material that might be excluded now to save on printing costs. On the other hand, publishers still have reservations regarding the security of the technology and fear that e-books will provide a new channel for copyright violations and intellectual property piracy. (Chronicle of Higher Education 30 Oct 98)

THE iMAC MAKES A STATEMENT - Intel chairman Andy Grove thinks that the extremely rapid growth of the Internet is leading the industry into "the Valley of Death" - a destructive period in which "the technology and the devices will change." He says computers are essentially designed as standalone general-purpose devices to which networking has been added as an afterthought, whereas future computers will have to be designed as networking machines that also do computing. What would they be like? "The iMac embodies a lot of the things I'm talking about. Sometimes what Apple does has an electrifying effect on the rest of us." (Time 5 Oct 98)

BANDWIDTH BOOM - Industry analysts see a communications bandwidth boom on the horizon, with AT&T, WorldCom and Mindspring making major enhancements to their networks and with four other companies (Qwest, Level 3, ITXC, and Williams Communications) building "the equivalent of 80 AT&Ts" (according to North River Ventures). Whereas in 1985 it took six fibers in a fiber-optic line to broadcast a football game, one fiber today could handle 700 such broadcasts. Experts say that these developments could drive the cost of a long-distance phone call to 1 cent a minute within a year, and should soon thereafter make possible full-fledged TV over the Internet. (USA Today 8 Oct 98)

GETTING THE WORD TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB - Motorola, SAP, Visa, Broadvision, and the Nuance Communications unit of SRI International have formed an alliance to extend the Voice Markup Language (VoxML) speech recognition standard to various commercial applications. Called V-Commerce, the new standard will allow people to use voice commands to interact with the World Wide Web or corporate Intranets via phone, pager or personal computer. Nuance chief executive Ron Croen says, "So far, electronic commerce has been constrained by the PC. We're intent on making the audience larger by an order of magnitude." Visa has created some prototype applications for financial services, including credit card activation, lost and stolen card replacement, travel planning, voice banking and bill payment. (New York Times 6 Oct 98