With San Francisco's world-famous Lombard Street -- the so-called curviest street in the world -- a block away and Alcatraz resplendent in the glow of a late afternoon sun, it was only natural that one of the nearest available Wi-Fi networks was named "Rice-a-Roni." Until recently, intrepid wireless internet hunters would never have known the name of any of the myriad 802.11 signals pouring from these tony apartment buildings without opening their laptops. That's because none of the handheld devices on the market that indicate the presence and strength of available Wi-Fi signals could detect network names.

Under an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, a man known as the "Spam King" will stop infecting computers with advertising programs until a federal lawsuit against him is resolved. Sanford Wallace and his companies, SmartBot.net of Richboro, Pa., and Seismic Entertainment Productions, are required by the agreement to send online ads only to people who visit their Web sites.

Internet travel sites are cheating cities on taxes by pocketing the difference between the hotel room tax they pay and the amount collected from consumers, the city of Los Angeles said in a recent lawsuit.

As companies throughout the world pay special attention to charitable giving after the Indian Ocean tsunami, Google is gearing up to launch its corporate foundation in the coming year. Google's founders have announced their intention to create the Google Foundation with their April 2004 "owner's manual," and now the company is in search of an executive director to head the group.

A Canadian student was called a "wave rat" for offering the domain name "tsunamirelief.com" for $50,000 on the online auction site eBay, but his mother said he was only trying to raise money for relief efforts.

Leading wireless carriers and telecoms equipment makers have agreed to develop an advanced mobile phone standard capable of sending high-resolution video in an instant, Japan's NTT DoCoMo said on Friday.

The Big Trend - Forget segmenting and targeting consumers by age, income and all that jazz. Behavioral marketing is the big thing. An increasing number of companies are using Internet tracking software that helps them follow and analyze millions of Web users.

The number of blogs and the use of blog readers rose rapidly last year--but a majority of Americans still do not know what a blog is.

Has there ever been a brand name like Google? Non-existent six years ago, it's now a part of the global language, as in, "I Googled this," or "I Googled that," or "I Googled you." To Google, a verb, is to get an instant answer by using the company's super-computer to look up anything on the Internet. What began as a school project is now worth about as much as Ford and General Motors combined, thanks to a stock that has roughly doubled in price since the company went public last August.

As part of its 75th anniversary celebration, Business Week is profiling the greatest innovators of the past seven-and-a-half decades. In its Dec. 20, 2004 issue, the magazine spotlighted "The Wizard of Web Retailing," Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. Which prompted us to take a closer look at Amazon.com.