A personal caching device, an e-government aid and streaming TV are part of the latest developments on the Internet this week.

The best one is Webaroo, a free piece of software allows you to search and browse real web pages without a connection.

This is especially useful if you?re a businessperson on the move.

The caching software allows you to hook your laptop, PDA or smart phone into the Internet, tank up on information fuel, and blast off to the next destination.

En route you open the software and browse through the sites you need to look up. You can automatically update the sites when you plug into the Internet again or download new content.

Webaroo also has what it calls ?Web Packs?,downloadable content from the company?s site that are regularly updated. The company uses search algorithms to shrink down the million gigabytes of web material down to a much smaller size.You can hold as much of the Web at any one time as your hard drive will bear.

Thus search for a topic and you can get the first few pages of your clickable search results.

The company has also teamed up with laptop maker Acer to compress a big chunk of the Web on a notebook. Check it out at: .

Help is on the way through the EU?s eMayor project for small governments and municipalities struggling to get citizen services online. The open source platform is still undergoing tests within the EU but Pim Hengeveld, project manager of eMayor, said the eventual aim is ?to bring e-government within the reach of smaller government organisations around the world?.

He doesn?t say how or when, but essentially EU countries will get first trials at using the platform. It is targeted at the many municipalities that lack the resources to develop the kind of e-government services that would make such online interaction quick, easy, and above all, secure.

Since 2004 a pan-European team, led by Deloitte in the Netherlands, has been testing and tweaking the platform.

Deloitte completed testing of the prototype at the end of 2005. This involved 100 testers, representing city administrators, citizens, universities and companies.

Deloitte is now preparing for a large-scale field trial in the border regions of Germany, Poland, Italy and France. Good luck with all those languages and systems!

The platform will make it easier for government IT workers to implement security technologies such as digital identity cards. eMayor has already been tested in five European countries. In December, successful trials were completed for the cities Aachen, Seville, Sienna and Bolzano. The business model is not in licensing the software,since eMayor is based on open source, but in developing services that use the platform. The developers say municipalities can use the platform to prevent fraud and for e-procurement, where businesses put in bids to supply governments.

Lastly, ABC announced this week that, during May and June, you will be able to stream episodes of ?Lost? and ?Desperate Housewives? over the Internet, for no charge.

ABC and other networks owned by the Walt Disney Co. will also stream full episodes of other programs, including ?That?s So Raven? and ?PowerRangers?.

Along with the shows you?ll also get all those advertising you?re used to watching. Convergence anyone?

P.S. While you?re waiting check out http://television.aol.com and click on the In2TVsection. AOL already has a pile of television shows available for free. The episodes feature dramas,comedies and thrillers.

The ?land rush? for European domain Internet names began last Friday, and about 1.3 million ?.eu? have been registered so far, according to Eurid.

About700,000 were registered on 7 April, the first day the domain became available to individuals living in the EU.

Eurid is the non-profit agency overseeing the new netname. Businesses, trademark and holders of prior rights to a name have been able to register under the domain name for the past four months.

About 300,000.eu domains were registered during that period.