Monday, March 11, 2002		Article

Net at home

NEARLY half a billion persons around the world had access to the Internet from their homes by the end of last year, Nielsen/NetRatings said last week.

The Internet measurement firm said some 498 million persons could surf the Web from home by the end of 2001, a jump of 5.1 per cent from the figure in July-September.

People in Asia continued to hook up faster than anywhere else, with home Web access growing 5.6 per cent in the last three months of the year from the previous quarter.

Europeans were next, with connections up 4.9 per cent, followed by computer users in Latin America and the United States, which had respective growth rates of 3.3 and 3.5 per cent.

Of the eight countries the company monitors in Asia, Singapore had the highest access rate. Some 60 per cent of households in the island-state of four million people could log on to the Net.

South Korea and Hong Kong ranked second and third at 58 and 56 per cent, respectively.

India ranked last with only seven percent of households enjoying Internet access. India's Internet subscriber base is not growing quickly because relatively few people can afford personal computers and access costs can be high.

Hi-tech help for Bacchus lovers

FANCY a pint but don't know where to turn? A pair of beer-loving entrepreneurs have just the solution - a computer that straps onto the wrist and directs the wearer to the nearest pub, Britain's Sun newspaper reported.

The hi-tech device uses satellite-positioning systems to determine the wearer's location, then prints the addresses of the four nearest pubs on a screen, the paper said on Friday.

The contraption, called eSleeve, also recognises the wearer's voice and can even help drunken revellers find their way home, according to Bristol University inventors Cliff Randell and Henk Muller.

Randell was quoted as saying: "It works perfectly, but might have trouble recognising your voice after one too many pints."