For a bit of fun try www.trailervision.com which does a switch around.

"People say they liked the trailer more than they liked the movie,'' the site posits. "What if there was no movie?''. From the mind of Albert Nerenberg comes a site which takes off from a Canadian television show on Toronto's CityTV.

There you can watch a series of playful trailers for films that don't exist.

You'll need the Quick Time plugin from Apple (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download) to view the "trailers''. The Man with No Head is generally considered the best of the bunch. According to the blurb it features a businessman hooked up to three cellphones, two beepers and other machines who's too busy to pay attention to traffic, gets hit by a truck, loses an important part of his body, survives, and is nursed back to health by a homeless woman who teaches him to rely on the senses of his body, not his brain. Good luck to you if you pick that story up from the accompanying Quick Time file. Be ready to chew through some hookup time when you download this sucker. Toronto's CityTV has actually optioned the short to be made into a movie.

Compaq has come up with the MP1600 electronic slide projector. The MP1600 is for electronic slide shows, software demos and group presentations. It's the smallest of its type on record weighing in at 1.9 kilograms and measuring 20 X 23 X 7.6 centimetres. Compaq calls the machine a "microportable'' since it's constructed of sturdy magnesium alloy to take the abuse of travel. The MP1600 features the digital light processing technology patented by Texas Instruments, which claims to give a brighter, sharper picture than liquid-crystal-display. All this can be yours for about $5080 in the US. The description is at www.compaq.com.

Trogon Computer Corp. has developed a portable 56K v.90 modem designed to work with many computing devices, including the Palm Pilot. The Unimicro weighs about 80 grams and operates on two AAA batteries. It connects to the serial port and sells for about $130 in the US. Go to www.trogoncomputer.com or phone 562-802-8702 for information.

Items people have attempted to sell on Internet auction site EBay either as a joke or (shudder) for real: Used underwear, a healthy human kidney, a young man's virginity, a missile, a bazooka, a Russian-made rocket launcher, counterfeit items, false identification documents, police badges, a group of engineers (who attempted to auction themselves as "high-priced, professionally trained cybergeeks'' for $3.14 million), and equity in a price comparison Internet company for $10 million (by Priceman.com).

EBay has since banned or haulted the sale of all the above over good taste and questions of legality. The company's reports to the police have led to several fraud prosecutions.

While some may scorn the hype over the Internet here's some of the facts...er...statistics. A University of Texas study found that more than a million jobs were now involved in the Internet. Business to business is big.

General Electric is doing a billion dollars of business a year over the Internet. Forrester Research estimates two billion orders will be placed over the Internet this year. Worldwide, e-commerce will generate $95 billion in revenue by the end of the year, and top $1.1 trillion by 2002, (up from $15 billion in 1997), according to a recent estimate from Deloitte Consulting.

A survey by Canada's Nielsen Media Research found that households with Internet access watch 13 percent less television on average than those households that are not online.

With Directrade and Husband and wife team David and Antoinette Bolden, the principals of Emerald Financial Group, and have scored a coup of sorts by becoming one of the first local companies to provide Internet brokering services along with Bermuda Investment Advisory Services Ltd. (see story).

They'll have to work hard to maintain their edge as the two major banks come on line to compete. They are also going to be competing with the whole world for the online dollar. Personal finance is the second most popular business on the Web, after pornography. Investors opened about three million Web brokerage accounts last year, helping to drive online trades to an estimated 30 percent of all daily trading volume.

Costs range from $8 to $30 a trade. The top ten online brokerage sites according to Wired magazine are Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments, ETrade, Discover Brokerage, Datek Online, Suretrade.com, DLJdirect, A.B. Watley, Waterhouse Securities, and Quick & Reilly.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. Contact Ahmed at techtattle ygazette.newsmedia.bm or 295-5881 ext. 248 or 238-3854.