CHARLES SCHWAB & CO. INC. said that retail investors now buy and sell over $2 billion in securities value each week through its site. Schwab said its site handled $26 billion in securities transactions during the first quarter of 1998.

"Online brokerage services have proven to be the killer app in electronic commerce," said Nicole Vanderbilt, director of e-commerce at Jupiter Communications. Jupiter said that online trading households will reach 31 percent of the personal investing market by 2002, compared with online banking, which will reach 19 percent of the banking market in the same year. Schwab said it reached 1.74 million active online accounts and $120 billion in online customer assets at month-end May 1998, an increase of over 500,000 active online accounts and $40 billion in online assets since December 1997.

JULY 11-12: Ball Semiconductor (Allen, Texas) hosts a technology conference at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with a focus on spherical semiconductors. George Gilder is the keynote. The site has info and online registration.

EE TIMES' contributing editor R. Colin Johnson has updated his smart-technologies demonstrations. See differential evolution, "floys" and an "artificial life garden".

"IT'S NO ACCIDENT that despite all the ink spilled over the war between Netscape and Microsoft, the dominant Web server software is still the freeware Apache server, and that for all the hype about Java, it's still the freeware Perl language that activates the majority of Web sites.

"About three years ago I argued that Netscape represented the greatest danger to the Internet. They started the movement to take HTML private.

"Netscape's move back to a freeware model is an admission that the proprietary approach didn't work."
-Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Publishing

ELECTRO-SPACE FABRICATORS INC. (Topton, Pa.), a precision sheet-metal fabricator, has a site. Find info on how the company serves OEM industries in telecommunications, industrial controls and computer manufacturing.

ELECTROSWITCH ELECTRONIC PRODUCTS (Raleigh, N.C.), a manufacturer of electromechanical rotary switches, has added downloadable standard and metric catalogs as well as a product selector for its line of switches.

DESIGN ENGINEERS have to love a site with a URL like www.chips.ibm.com. And the IBM Microelectronics division doesn't disappoint. In the tradition of IBM's ambitious and pioneering Web sites-ones jam-packed with useful technical information for engineers-this one is also far from being a mere marketing site.

Tour through the microelectronics world at IBM, such as the custom logic and processor divisions, with navigable ease. A trip through communications networking ICs, to cite one example, has a neat layout with news, product showcases and technical PDF papers.

The IBM Blue Logic site (which is focused on integration of multiple cores into ASIC design) offers information on its system-level-silicon design methodology and its ASIC Design Centers.

There's the online version of the Microelectronics Design magazine. Its timely features include "Engineers Abroad," which discusses how engineers are adapting to working and living in foreign cultures.

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