GLOBAL CORPORATE BANKING SITES on the Internet will undergo a fourfold increase over the next two years to about 2,000 sites, according to a study by the management consulting firm Booz-Allen & Hamilton, and 600 to 700 of them will be fully functional.

The study focused on 220 financial institutions around the world and found 519 corporate banking Web sites in existence. Retail banki ng sites number about 1,200, but the study's author, David Howe, said that corporate banking will close the gap with the emergence of e-commerce, Web applications and customer demand.

"Today's snapshot reveals that most financial institutions have no corporate-banking Internet sites," said Howe. "Of those that do, 92 percent offer only basic functionality. But the picture by the year 2000 will be very different".

EDTN offers a new Web-only column from sci.engr founder and robotics engineer Ron Graham. The former NASA Lewis veteran offers working engineers involved in or contemplating startups advice and war stories from his direct experience.

"THE INTERNET is a transformational technology for the digital economy. It allows for suppliers to have a fundamentally different kind of relationship with customers. You can be more aggressive around the thinking of the kinds of products and services that you want to re-engineer for.

"Internet technology isn't just acting as an enabler-it's changing what the business is.

"In re-re-engineering for the digital era, you have to step back and ask the questions: Is the theory of business still sufficient? Will the fundamental business still operate? And how will Internet technology change the business?"

-Jim Champy, coauthor of Re-engineering the Corporation

EDA FIRM DENALI SOFTWARE INC. (Palo Alto, Calif.) offers a RealAudio broadcast on the pros and cons of writing memory models from scratch (these models simulate the memory components of a design. Straight tal k, with a slide show.

THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION (CEMA) has published a new standard for home networking, the EIA-709, which looks to enable myriad intelligent home products. Find information at their site.

SEVA TECHNOLOGIES INC. (Fremont, Calif.), which provides training and design solutions for the EDA, ASIC, custom IC and FPGA markets, has a site. Find out about the company's platform benchmark testing of Windows NT, to determine if it is a viable design-engineering platform.

3M's ELECTRONIC HANDLING AND PROTECTION DIVISION (Austin, Texas) offers the "Textool" Sockets and Trays site, with info about production IC sockets, test and burn-in sockets and transport trays.

PALMCHIP CORP. (San Jose, Calif.), which bills itself "the Virtual ASIC Company," has a site offering info on its IP licensing and providing design services for embedded applications within the mass-storage, printer, mobile communications and networking industries.

YOU'VE GOT TO ADMIRE 16-year-old Brooklyn-based Feliks Pinkhusovich. An aspiring EE at the William E. Grady Technical Vocational High School, he's put together a labor-of-love electronics information site called "Circuit Central" that's pretty darn useful.

The site, shows off his Web-surfing prowess by featuring a comprehensive set of EE-related links for publications, Usenet, software, and vendors, but Pinkhusovich goes deeper still.

He's got a neat image-map-based components primer; a virtual library with more than 80 circuits with either a brief description or complete download; and a "Basics" tutorial with acronyms and a glossary. There's also a page of tutorials, some of which he wrote himself, and an online collection of pinouts.

It appears that Pinkhusovich is a bit of a hacker as well (his handle is DarkN|Ght), and some of the links are in the "underground engineering" territory. But it's all in the interest of good clean fun. And like a good enterprising EE, he's even got some sponsors to post ads on-site. Silicon Valley headhunters, heads up!

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