Fans of Mozilla's free, open-source Firefox browser make the ardent Apple faithful look like a bunch of slackers. Their community-generated Spread Firefox (SFX) campaign, launched less than two months ago, is already one of the watershed campaigns in interactive marketing history. It's helped generate over a million downloads per day since Firefox went out of beta on Tuesday; registered over 25,000 volunteer marketers; encouraged about 100,000 Web sites to display promotional buttons and banners; generated wall-to-wall coverage in the blogosphere and mainstream media; and raised a quarter of a million dollars for a full-page ad in The New York Times.

After 14 months of work and a $100 million investment, Microsoft rolled out a test version of its new search engine late Wednesday night. The new MSN Search mimics technologies already offered by Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. For instance, MSN offers direct answers from its Encarta encyclopedia to natural language searches such as "What is the capital of Albania?" It has a personalization tool that lets searchers set criteria for searches. Other features include local search; image and news search; and search shortcuts.

When Gilles Babinet looks at a cell phone, he sees a music store, an iPod and even a nascent platform for a tiny-screened MTV. The curly-haired Parisian is the chairman and founder of Musiwave, the company that powers Vodafone's new mobile phone music download service, which launched across Europe this week. He's sure that huge numbers of people will eventually find it natural to buy and listen to music on cell phones--but in some countries more than others.

Mention "audit" to David Barlin, vice president of marketing for I/Pro, a company that verifies audience data for about 500 small and medium-sized websites, and he practically gushes. "They're exciting," he said, not at all defensively. "Really." That's because he and the company he works for see a potential gold mine in independently auditing the traffic for all the sites that are not Google, Yahoo or MSNBC -- the tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of commercial websites dedicated to niche subjects like business-to-business, chemical engineering, software development and online publishing.

The latest hoax e-mail purporting to come from George W. Bush has the president admitting to a series of election frauds. It follows previous spam that claimed to come from Bush and had him offering a litany of reasons why he shouldn't be re-elected.

An elderly man in shorts, T-shirt and unlaced shoes, sitting on a park bench behind his RV and working on a notebook computer enabled with wireless Internet access. That's a portrait of one of the new American consumers. "I call him Billy Bob WiFi," said Kelly Mooney, president of Resource Interactive, Columbus, OH. "It's so easy to say this is a couch potato. The consumer today is different, so old stereotypes don't necessarily apply. We need to ask what's the role of technology. Technology has empowered a power shift."

Web search leader Google Inc. said on Wednesday it will soon make it possible for users of its free Gmail service to check their e-mail via Microsoft Outlook or on certain handheld devices such as mobile phones.

A new strain of spam soon could have consumers spitting mad. "Spit" - spam over Internet telephony - is beginning to surface as more people make phone calls over the Internet instead of regular phone lines, security experts say.

Amazon.com chief executive Jeff Bezos on Tuesday said the online retailer was poised for record holiday sales, with MP3 players and digital cameras leading the way as this year's hot gift items.

Microsoft Corp. will launch on Thursday its long-promised Internet search engine, which will compete directly with market leader Google Inc., sources close to the company said on Tuesday. The world's largest software maker had promised to enter the search market with its own technology by the end of the year, as it seeks to attract more users to boost advertising revenue for its MSN Internet division.