THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION (Arlington, Va.) has released a survey that shows 23 percent of U.S. Internet users, or 20 million people, have already made an e-commerce purchase.

The survey shows that "e-commerce is becoming one of the most important developments in the retail marketplace," said Jim Firestone, chairman of CEMA's communication division.

Of the Internet users who have yet to make an online purchase, nearly half (49 percent) said they have no need to make one or that they prefer to shop in a traditional retail atmosphere, the survey said. Meanwhile, 36 percent said they were concerned about the security of their personal information.

CEMA is a sector of the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA), the 74-year-old trade organization that represents all facets of electronics manufacturing.

MENTOR GRAPHICS' microtec division (San Jose, Calif.) has a site for engineers who want to enter a design into competition for the company's Embedded Technology Leadership Awards program. The deadline for entries is June 30.

EE TIMES' Alexander Wolfe's Web-only "Wintel Watch" column
features an interview with Wei-mei Hwu,
a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
about challenges facing Intel's Merced CPU architecture.

"WE NOW HAVE 88 telco carriers investing $2.9 billion, representing 50 countries. [Worldwide underseas fiber-optic network] Project Oxygen will see construction by September.

"We have a 'living network'; when customers need more bandwidth, we will build into it, and the network will never be obsolete.

"In three years the carrier business will be significantly different. Phone calls will be charged on a fixed monthly price from any country in the world, and we will see a video-based Internet-with 10,000 channels to choose from."

-Neil Tagare, chief executive, CTR Group, founder of Project Oxygen

CAS-CIRCUIT CORP. (Huntsville, Ala.), an independent pc-board layout and circuit-design service, has a site with info on the company's various pc-board prototyping and demo boards.

CYPRESS SEMICONDUCTOR CORP. (San Jose, Calif.) has launched an interactive forum on its site to respond to the information needs of small and midsized investors. Questions posted to the forum will be answered directly by Dan McCranie, the company's vice president of sales and marketing.

RAPID PROTOTYPES INC. (Carson City, Nev.), which provides product-development help using high-performance FPGAs and reconfigurable computing, plans to ship reconfigurable FPGAs that can be downloaded with hardware upgrades from the company's site. Papers on design are also available.

QUESTLINK TECHNOLOGY INC. has added a "Discrete Index"
to its EE Design Center-a central online resource
that allows engineers to compare, evaluate and purchase products,
including discrete devices.

"ALL MY LIFE, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us and have tried to find scientific answers to them." So said British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who is the author of A Brief History of Time.

The perennial PBS-television six-show series "Stephen Hawking's Universe" has an accompanying Web site that is stellar-no pun intended.

Find essays by astronomy experts that draw from the programs, and "Strange Stuff Explained," focuses on phenomena such as quarks, wormholes, the Big Bang, black holes-and everything else Hawking.

This site provides a fascinating, in-depth look at the "cosmological stars"-the unsung theorists and scientists who are discovering the secrets of the universe and beyond. Also, check out "unsolved mysteries," as cosmologists address such probing questions as "Is time travel possible?" Is the universe inhabited?" and "Is there a theory of everything?"