In a step toward the type of future pictured in the hit film “Iron Man,” a firm in the Netherlands is letting people fabricate items designed in three-dimensions on the Internet.

Shapeways chief executive Peter Weijmarshausen depicts the “rapid manufacture” service launched online this week as a natural extension of a trend in which people make videos, music, and written works on the Internet.

“People are creative in their leisure time; uploading films to YouTube, making profiles at social networking websites and posting on blogs,” Shapeways executive Jochem de Boer told AFP in an interview this week.

“They like to turn ideas into reality.”

With the Shapeways service, instead of digital content people design items that are manufactured and shipped to their doors.

Software lets online designers flip, turn and tinker with virtual designs onscreen in a variation on how film character Tony Stark manipulated computer imagery while inventing his Iron Man suit.

Creations have included clocks and tools. A man making an anime film made a model of his lead character and a model train hobbyist in the Netherlands re-created his home town in miniature using the service.

“There is no limit if you can use 3-D software,” de Boer said. “We want to go farther and enable people that cannot use 3-D software.”

Amazon has introduced two new payment systems for merchants and consumers which brings it into a market dominated by PayPal.

Checkout is aimed at online merchants who want a pre-packaged payment system, including tools for managing delivery charges, VAT, promotions and special offers. It features Amazon’s One-click option for rapid payment.

Simple Pay is aimed at consumers who want to use their Amazon account to make purchases on other retailers’ websites.

A start-up led by former star Google engineers on Sunday unveiled a new Web search service that aims to outdo the Internet search leader in size, but faces an uphill battle changing Web surfing habits.

Cuil Inc pronounced cool is offering a new search service at www.cuil.com that the company claims can index, faster and more cheaply, a far larger portion of the Web than Google, which boasts the largest online index.

The would-be Google rival says its service goes beyond prevailing search techniques that focus on Web links and audience traffic patterns and instead analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each user search request.

Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user, Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

Danny Sullivan, a Web search analyst and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, said Cuil can try to exploit complaints consumers may have with Google — namely, that it tries to do too much, that its results favor already popular sites, and that it leans heavily on certain authoritative sites such as Wikipedia.

The time may be right for a challenger, Sullivan says, but adds quickly: Competing with Google is still a very daunting task, as Microsoft will tell you.

Microsoft Corp, the No. 3 U.S. player in Web search has been seeking in vain, so far, to join forces with No. 2 Yahoo Inc to battle Google.

Cuil was founded by a group of search pioneers, including Costello, who built a prototype of Web Fountain, IBM s Web search analytics tool, and his wife, Anna Patterson, the architect of Google Inc s massive TeraGoogle index of Web pages. Patterson also designed the search system for global corporate document storage company Recall, a unit of Australia s Brambles Ltd

The two are joined by two former Google colleagues, Russell Power and Louis Monier. Previously, Monier led the redesign of ecommerce leader eBay Inc s search engine and was the founding chief technology officer of two 1990s Web milestones, AltaVista and BabelFish, the first language translation site.

They do have the talent that is used to building large, industrial-strength search engines, Sullivan says of Cuil.

Google Inc. is taking the wraps off an Internet encyclopedia designed to give people a chance to show off - and profit from - their expertise on any topic.

The service, dubbed “knol” in reference to a unit of knowledge, had been limited to an invitation-only audience of contributors and readers for the past seven months.

Now anyone with a Google login will be able to submit an article and, if they choose, have ads displayed through the Internet search leader’s marketing system. The contributing author and Google will share any revenue generated from the ads, which are supposed to be related to the topic covered in the knol.

The advertising option could encourage people to write more entries about commercial subjects than the more academic topics covered in traditional encyclopedias.

Since Google disclosed its intention to build knol, it has been widely viewed as the company’s answer to Wikipedia, which has emerged as one of the Web’s leading reference tools by drawing upon the collective wisdom of unpaid, anonymous contributors.

But Google views knol more as a supplement to Wikipedia than a competitor, said Cedric Dupont, a Google product manager. Google reasons that Wikipedia’s contributors will be able to use some of the expertise shared on knol to improve Wikipedia’s existing entries.

With a seven-year head start on knol, Wikipedia already has nearly 2.5 million English-language articles and millions more in dozens of other languages.

Knol is starting out with several hundred entries. The initial topics covered include an overview of constipation by a University of San Francisco associate professor of gastroenterology and backpacking advice from one of Google’s own software engineers.

With the market for electronic books still relatively sleepy, Sony Corp. is trying a new tack: untethering the latest model of its e-book reading device from its own online bookstore.

On Thursday, Sony will provide a software update to the Reader, a thin slab with a 6-inch screen, so the device can display books encoded in a format being adopted by several large publishers. That means Reader owners will be able to buy electronic books from stores other than Sony’s.

“This upgrade opens the door to a whole host of paid and free content from third-party e-book stores, Web sites and even public libraries,” said Steve Haber, senior vice president of consumer product marketing for Sony Electronics.

Internet television service provider Joost said it launched a Chinese service Wednesday with local portal TOM Online to tap the world’s largest online market.

The company has also set up a joint venture with Hong Kong-listed TOM Group, parent of TOM Online, to bring a full Joost offering to China, Joost said in a statement posted on its website.

“There’s a great market opportunity in China: content producers who are making high-quality content, advertisers eager to reach consumers online, and an active online community,” said CEO Mike Volpi.

More than 1,600 years after it was written in Greek, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become globally accessible online for the first time this week.

From Thursday, sections of the Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the oldest complete New Testament, will be available on the Internet, said the University of Leipzig, one of the four curators of the ancient text worldwide.

High resolution images of the Gospel of Mark, several Old Testament books, and notes on the work made over centuries will appear on www.codex-sinaiticus.net as a first step towards publishing the entire manuscript online by next July.

Ulrich Johannes Schneider, director of Leipzig University Library, which holds part of the manuscript, said the publication of the Codex online would allow anyone to study a work of “fundamental” importance to Christians.

Web retailer Amazon.com Inc will introduce a new online store of TV shows and movies on Thursday, called Amazon Video on Demand, The New York Times said.

Customers of Amazon’s new store will be able to start watching any of 40,000 movies and television programs immediately after ordering them because they stream, just like programs on a cable video-on-demand service, the paper said.

The service is different from most Internet video stores, such as Apple’s iTunes and the original incarnation of Amazon’s video store, which require users to wait as video files are downloaded to their hard drives.

Amazon could not be immediately reached for comment.

Amazon has also struck a deal with electronics giant Sony to place its Internet video store on the Sony Bravia line of high-definition TVs, the paper said.

Amazon would pursue similar deals with other makers of TVs and Internet devices, Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital media, told the paper.

Amazon Video on Demand will be accessible to a limited number of invited Amazon.com customers on Thursday before it opens more broadly to other users later this summer.

Blind people generally use computers with the help of screen-reader software, but those products can cost more than $1,000, so they’re not exactly common on public PCs at libraries or Internet cafes. Now a free new Web-based program for the blind aims to improve the situation.

It’s called WebAnywhere, and it was developed by a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington. Unlike software that has to be installed on PCs, WebAnywhere is an Internet application that can make Web surfing accessible to the blind on most any computer.

The developer, Jeffrey Bigham, hopes it lets blind people check a flight time on a public computer at the airport, plan a bus route at the library or type up a quick e-mail at an Internet cafe.

Delver.com today unveiled an alpha version of the first true social search engine. Delver maps a user’s social connections then delivers comprehensive Web search results ranked according to their social relevance to that user.

Delver, based on the user’s search query, organizes and ranks publicly displayed content, found on social networking profiles, web sites, blogs, bookmarks, and photo and video sharing sites from the user’s online social network. A ‘breadcrumb’ is shown next to each result, showing how that result is related to the user, thus qualifying its relevance.

“Delver is designed to ‘delve’ into your online social graph to generate search results gathered from your friends, your network and your friends’ networks, to help you find information more relevant to you as an individual,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver. “We prioritize results based on your network to make Web search more fun and meaningful, while enabling you to discover others in your extended network who share common interests.”

Delver also gives users the ability to tap into the content and network of people whose opinion they value by adding them as ‘Search Buddies’. Delver prioritizes results from ‘Search Buddies’ and their network as if they were the users’ friends. Furthermore, Delver provides a number of features for organizing and retaining the information found as a result of a search query. When results are yielded, user’s may choose the “keep it” option, which stores the selected links in the appropriate categories for compiling lists or easier reference later on.

Though Delver.com is in an early stage of product development, it demonstrates the great potential and necessity of social search. Delver currently covers Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, Youtube, Hi5, FriendFeed, Digg and Delicious; other sources, such as Facebook and the top blogging platforms will be added to the service over the next few months.

Time Warner Inc’s AOL will launch a personal finance site on Tuesday, adding to a roster of new properties that do not bear its name.

The new site, called WalletPop.com, is a spin-off of AOL’s Money & Finance channel and will focus on consumer and personal finance. AOL Money & Finance will continue to business and investing news and tools.

The launch of another site not bearing the AOL brand is part of a plan to create new online businesses courting younger audiences unfamiliar with a company whose heyday ended with the popularity of high speed Internet access.

Sony says it will start a movie download service for its PlayStation 3 home console this summer in the U.S.

Kazuo Hirai, who heads Sony Corp.’s video game unit, said Thursday the service will be offered in Japan and Europe at later dates, although details won’t be available until next month.

Hirai said the company will strengthen its network services and further cut costs to achieve profitability in the Sony gaming business in the current fiscal year ending March 2009.