The Council for Internet Commerce today announced the opening of the second and final round of voting on the Standard for Internet Commerce, a codification of e-commerce best practices to increase consumer satisfaction, confidence and trust. Through Dec. 6, the public is encouraged to join the council’s founding members in their votes and shaping the content of the commerce standard. Consumers visiting the Commerce Standard site will be able to cast their votes in categories ranging from disclosure practices to customer support, in an easy-to-use multiple choice format. www.commercestandard.com
Month: November 1999 (Page 4 of 13)
The e-content company, a division of Interleaf, announced two new additions to their growing roster of e-Partners. Tata Infotech, one of the largest information technology organizations in India, and SDI, a provider of knowledge-based services, will team with the e-content company to provide solutions with BladeRunner, the e-content company’s XML content management solution for e-business. Tata InfoTech and SDI are the most recent addition to the e-content company’s e-Partner Program. In addition to joining as a Consulting Partner, companies may also join as a Technology Provider, Platform Provider, Complementary Software Provider, Reseller, or OEM depending upon their area of expertise. Since it was introduced in January, several companies have joined the e-Partner Program such as Microsoft, NetPerceptions, UWI.Com, and Hewlett-Packard among others. www.xmlecontent.com
Cascade Systems Inc. announced that it has signed a Letter of Agreement to merge with Pindar Systems. The two privately held companies, who expect the transaction to be completed by the end of January, plan to combine their engineering, marketing, and financial resources. E-merchandising represents an explosive market for the new millennium. Pindars’s catalog publishing products combined with Cascades’s e-merchandising technology will provide a powerful e-commerce solution covering web, print and e-mail. The National Retail Federation and International Data Corporation forecasts sales in e-merchandising to grow from $2 billion in 2000 to more than $8 billion in 2003. Although Internet commerce continues to grow at a rapid pace with anticipated revenues of $84 billion by 2004, print catalogs remain a big business. The Direct Marketing Association estimates print catalog sales will grow from $93 billion in 1999 to more than $125 billion by 2004. Both companies recognize the importance of continuity in shared product information databases as the key to effective print and electronic merchandising in the next century. www.cascadenet.com
The Open Group announced an agreement to serve as the certification authority for the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum’s world standard for wireless information and telephony services. For certification testing, The Open Group developed a test suite specification to ensure wireless vendors’ products are compliant with the WAP V1.1 specification. As the certification authority, The Open Group will develop and operate the certification program on behalf of the WAP Forum. The WAP Forum has a large number of specifications describing the functionality and specific coding requirements of wireless phones and other devices for WAP certification. The Open Group’s test suite measures conformance to the Wireless Markup Language (WML) application layer specifications, as well as WMLscript and WMLscript libraries. The certification test uses a WML server that delivers tests that run on the devices or phones, and performs a functionality and interoperability test at the application level. WML, an XML application, serves as the markup language for WAP devices, just as HTML is the markup language for web pages. WMLscript and the associated WMLscript Libraries define a programming language, related to the ECMAscript language used for programs to run on web browsers. The Open Group will develop additional tests for the cache model, which defines how WAP compliant phones and gateways store information. The consortium will also develop tests for the use of WAP phones in multiple languages, ensuring the phones will be able to display numerous characters sets, including Japanese, as well as the ASCII character set. www.opengroup.org
IntraNet Solutions, Inc., announced the availability of a QuickStart program for the recently launched Xpedio Content Management system that provides packaged consulting services to accelerate customer implementations. Xpedio is a single source, end-to-end content management solution that delivers quick deployment and fast return on investment. The QuickStart program for Xpedio includes an onsite dedicated technical services team providing support in key areas such as: database installation, system administration and security setup, meta data configuration, setup for custom templates and project files, Web layout and design, user interface and form design, configuration of business rules to enable personalization and profiling. Pricing for the Xpedio QuickStart program is $15,000 and is available immediately. www.intranetsolutions.com
NextPage announced broad availability of its LivePublish 2.0 suite of professional Internet and intranet publishing software products. LivePublish 2.0 is an XML-enabled enterprise publishing platform that gives corporate enterprises and commercial publishers unprecedented scalability, flexibility and control over their content including simultaneous distribution of content through corporate portals, commercial Web sites and disconnected, browser-based CD-ROM/DVD. NextPage LivePublish Suite 2.0 is available now from NextPage and its business partners worldwide. Corporate LivePublish Server pricing begins at $4,995 for 10 concurrent users. For commercial publishers, the LivePublish Server & Distribution Kit are priced at $9,995 plus additional fees for distribution of commercial publications. www.nextpage.com
PictureWorks Technology, Inc. announced it has applied for an U.S. Patent for its Web based media submission invention that serves as the front-end to the company’s Rimfire Internet imaging platform. PictureWorks Rimfire, which was released in April this year, processes tens of millions of images and media items for the company’s Web site partners with volume levels expected to double by year-end. Rimfire’s Web based media submission technology is a multi-platform, media agnostic technology that makes submitting rich media to Web sites `drag and drop simple’. The submission technology provides several unique and valuable functions for both end users and PictureWorks’ Web site partners. First, it lets the user either drag and drop a file from a flash card, CD, floppy or hard disk directly into a Web page, or the user can browse a directory to select a file to submit to the Web page. Secondly, the technology gives the user an opportunity to confirm the submission with a visual representation, for example by generating a thumbnail image of the rich media file that has been selected. Additionally, batch submission is provided to allow a user to drag and drop or select multiple media objects into a Web page. Submission from a Web page to a Web page is also provided for. Critical to meeting the diverse needs of different Web site’s, the submission tool is completely configurable. It is able to perform a variety of intelligent preprocessing on media objects prior to upload, for example, sizing, formatting, cropping, rotating, lightening or darkening. Additional information is captured when the media objects are submitted. The submission of information about the user and the media objects facilitates automatic integration of the media objects within existing databases. www.pictureworks.com
RealNetworks Inc. announced support for the W3C’s second working draft to advance the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) standard, known as SMIL Boston. This latest step forward in SMIL Boston builds upon the widespread adoption of SMIL as the integration language for Web-based multimedia. The SMIL Boston second working draft proposes extensions to the W3C approved SMIL 1.0 standard, based on feedback from thousands of SMIL 1.0 developers and tens of millions of consumer users and more than a billion SMIL presentations played on the Web since May 1998. Current members of the W3C Working Group developing SMIL Boston are key international industry players in Web multimedia, interactive television and audio/video streaming. In alphabetical order, they are: Canon, Compaq, CSELT, CWI, France Telecom, Gateway, GLOCOM, INRIA, Intel, Macromedia, Microsoft, Oratrix, NIST, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, RealNetworks and WGBH. SMIL is one of the key enabling technologies of Real.com Take 5, the Web’s daily programming service providing consumers with access to entertainment, music and news content on the Internet. Additionally, more than 100 channel partners on the Real.com Network offer SMIL presentations everyday to their consumers providing a more interactive experience on the Web. SMIL Boston modularizes SMIL functionality, providing standards based integration of SMIL functionality with other XML based languages and applications. Content authors and application developers both benefit from this flexibility: application developers can integrate needed functionality while content authors are able to build on their existing knowledge base. www.realnetworks.com
