McDonald's is expanding tests for a national DVD rental service in its restaurants, promising to turn the fast-food chain into a do-it-yourself Netflix for road warriors. The company has been testing a drop-off rental service in Denver through its Redbox subsidiary, letting customers rent discs for $1 a day. Today, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, becomes the fifth market where consumers can rent McDVDs, and the company plans to install its Redbox kiosks at 145 sites. Houston, Texas, will follow with 181 machines by July 1.

What happens when two of the world's most powerful brands come together? One of the more interesting side stories to the alliance between Apple Computer and Intel is whose brand, if either, will get a boost from the forthcoming Intel-based Mac.

To Web cognoscenti, the ad-supported vs. paid content argument is so 2001. One Net savant I canvassed yawningly explained that to be free or not to be free is a dumb question in today's consumer-controlled world. Even the more patient Jeff Marshall, senior vice president at Starcom IP, found my inquiry redundant. "Internet publishers will work more like the airlines: Consumers want different things so they have to pay different rates. There will be multiple models."

Tracking sexual predators in Florida. Guiding travelers to the cheapest gas nationwide. Pinpointing $1,500 studio apartments for rent in Manhattan. Geeks, tinkerers and innovators are crashing the Google party, having discovered how to tinker with the search engine's mapping service to graphically illustrate vital information that might otherwise be ignored, overlooked or not perceived as clearly.

Investors who bet on comparison-shopping search engines in the mid-1990s will be $1 billion richer in the third quarter once shareholders and regulators approve the sale of industry leaders Shopping.com and Shopzilla.com.

Mitsubishi Motors North America next week will launch an online digital game to promote the introduction of its redesigned 2006 Eclipse, a Mitsubishi spokeswoman said.

America Online wants to wrest users away from Yahoo and Google, but it will have to pay those companies tens of millions of dollars as it tries to do so.

Last year's award recipients took it all off for a new site promoting the YoungGuns International Advertising Award, which recognizes creative accomplishment in the under-30 agency set. Created by Crispin Porter and Bogusky, the site for the Awards' Call for Entries campaign is a spoof on the architecture and design used by many porn sites. The Web presence lives at Hardly-Legal.com and features semi-nude shots of creatives who were recognized last year, with their naughty bits covered by pictures of their work.

Amazon.com went dark yesterday, in a complete outage lasting 41 minutes, according to AlertSite, a vendor of products and services for Web performance measurement, systems monitoring and security vulnerability scanning.

Audi of America is crowing over the results of its alternate reality gaming (ARG) "Art of the Heist" viral campaign. The company says the game has generated four times more online buzz for the A3 compact car, has engaged more than 200,000 people in a single day, and has attracted 79 percent more qualified visitors to the Audi Web site, as compared with previous efforts.