An internet domain name auction held last Friday failed to attract the bidders its sellers were hoping for.

Hell.com was expected by domain asset management provider Moniker.com to be hot property, and had a $1 million reserve on it, but didn't sell, and is therefore now for sale in a silent auction. It is believed at the moment to be used by Final.org, an artists' collective, who use it as a "private destination" for their artwork.

There is, however, something going on that has the potential to change that, and quickly. Not coincidentally, a team of core developers from Netscape's early days is now developing the equivalent of a virtual world browser for MMOs. Called Multiverse, the company includes the same portentous entrepreneur noted above: Bill Turpin. His team includes Netscape veterans known throughout Silicon Valley, if not the world at large: Rafhael Cedeno and Robin McCollum, who built critical Netscape server technology still in use today, and co-creators of RSS; Jeff Weinstein, who coded the world-changing SSL; and Corey Bridges, Navigator product manager who then went on to launch companies like Netflix and Zone Labs. On the entertainment side, ex-physics major and film director/producer James Cameron, of Terminator and Titanic fame, has thrown his lot in with Multiverse, joining its board of advisors.

Their plan is to provide virtual world creators the client, server, and development tools to create an MMO world. The entire technology platform is free for non-commercial use, so academics are paying nothing to create economic, architectural, sociological and other simulations. For-profit enterprises would pay royalties, but only when their games or other applications collect money from consumers, not before.

This is significant because, until now, creating a complex virtual world required tens of millions of dollars in initial development costs alone. The Multiverse technology, currently in beta-testing, claims to lower the cost of virtual world production to a fraction of its current stratospheric level. For many purposes, such as personal online spaces, there would be no cost at all.

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod on Oct. 23, 2001, he said: "With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again."

Indeed, the iPod and Apple's iTunes music store have transformed the music business, sparking a new way for users to legally download music - and spurring a stunning rise in Apple stock.

Apple (up $0.43 to $79.42, Charts) shares, which traded around $9 five years ago, have risen nearly nine-fold since then.

iPod sales are still growing - shipments rose to 8.73 million in the latest quarter, up 35 percent from a year earlier- even though there's some serious competition out there now for the world's most popular digital music player.

That's because Google's markedly better than Yahoo and other rivals at squeezing more revenue for itself from the advertising it serves up, eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman said during a Monday interview. Also, Google's reputation as the online ad leader makes it more of a first choice for businesses trying out online advertising for the first time.

"These growth numbers establish Google as the unrivaled king of online advertising universe, leaving Yahoo, with its greater advertising diversity and years of media experience, struggling in second place," Hallerman said.

The eMarketer report also shows what a difference a year can make. In 2005, Yahoo and Google had virtually the same amount of U.S. ad revenues. Yet by the end of 2006, Google is expected to pocket almost twice the amount of U.S. ad revenues as Yahoo, according to the new eMarketer report.

This year, according to eMarketer, Yahoo will garner about $2.86 billion in U.S. ad revenues, or an 18% share. It's not a bad year, Hallerman notes, yet Yahoo's share of the U.S. online ad pie will drop this year, albeit fractionally.

See, McDonald's and Coca-Cola recently teamed up in Japan to give away 10,000 self-branded MP3 players pre-loaded with 10 spankin' new tunes and... some delicious malware. It seems that a "portion" of the players sport a variant of the QQPass family of trojan horses which capture passwords and other personal information when the MP3 player is plugged into the users' PC. The code then proceeds to email the details to the author. McDonald's has setup a 24 hour hotline while they are investigating the matter and will swap out all the offending players

Imagine being able to check instantly whether or not statements made by politicians were correct. That is the sort of service Google Inc. boss Eric Schmidt believes the Internet will offer within five years.

Politicians have yet to appreciate the impact of the online world, which will also affect the outcome of elections, Schmidt said in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.

He predicted that "truth predictor" software would, within five years, "hold politicians to account." People would be able to use programs to check seemingly factual statements against historical data to see to see if they were correct.

"One of my messages to them (politicians) is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting 'is this true or false.' We (at Google) are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability," he told the newspaper.

The mobile web is about to receive the biggest shake-up in years with the start of open registration for mobile phone-specific website addresses.

The general public can now register websites ending with .mobi (dotmobi) as the backers of the mobile net hope to overturn consumer apathy.

Only one in 10 mobile owners use their phones to surf the net due to concerns over cost, speed and poor content.

Sites ending dotmobi are designed for phones and must meet agreed standards.

According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don't understand the terms that describe what their device actually does.

So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication.

Terms such as podcasting and wikis are still meaningless to many.

"In the relentless quest for the next big thing when it comes to new forms of digital consumption, there is a significant tendency for the industry to over-estimate consumer's knowledge and understanding of the seemingly limitless new terms and products out there," said Alex Burmaster, internet analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google wouldn't disclose how much it paid for the property just a few miles from the company's campus in Mountain View, California.

"We were pleased to have the opportunity to purchase the place where Larry and Serge did early work," Google spokesman Jon Murchinson told AFP. "We bought it to preserve it as part of our legacy."

Brin and Page were students working on doctorate degrees at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, when they rented the garage from Susan Wojcicki so they could begin building Google.

Brin and Page were, in essence, leaving the security of university life to brave it in the business world, the company said.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost US$1.1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

In its latest quarterly test, Lyris tracked more than 57,000 e-mail messages, sent from 57 different businesses and nonprofit organizations to scores of e-mail addresses it owns in many different domains. The messages included marketing pitches for electronics and perfume, and noncommercial matter like a wine newsletter. None of the senders were Lyris clients; all the recipients had signed up to receive the messages.

In the most recent test, 3.3 percent of those e-mail messages were treated as spam by American Internet providers — something that marketers call a false positive.

Since the distinction between spam and legitimate e-mail is not always readily apparent, most providers have had to learn which marketers are legitimate. False positives result when they get it wrong. Individual marketers also get more false positives when they send badly aimed pitches, leading recipients to tag their messages as spam.