Month: February 2001 (Page 4 of 6)

In a move to meet the evolving syndication needs of the enterprise market, iSyndicate, the leading provider of Internet syndication infrastructure and application solutions, announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Austin, Texas-based Kurion, subject to customary closing conditions. Kurion’s technology automatically transforms any application or content into scalable Web services that can range from a single Web component, a Web page, product catalog, marketplace exchange or an entire personalization offering. This technology enhances iSyndicate’s current enterprise offering by adding an application syndication component that allows customers to repurpose, distribute and integrate Web applications. Initially, Kurion’s platform will be used to advance iSyndicate’s Private Syndication Network solution, which enables enterprises and other organizations to efficiently aggregate, distribute and share digital content and information among customers, partners, employees and other key audiences, over a secure, scalable and private network. As an added layer to PSN’s infrastructure, Kurion’s technology will permit businesses to dynamically manipulate any HTTP-accessible content and application into Web services – whether those digital assets are stored in a database, XML repository, static file or available only on the Web. Depending on a business’s requirements, manipulating information can be as simple as content “look and feel” changes or as complex as workflow emulation. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. iSyndicate will maintain Kurion’s Austin operations. www.isyndicate.com, www.kurion.com

divine interVentures, inc. announced that it will acquire enterprise information portal solutions company SageMaker, Inc., the first acquisition in divine’s previously-announced strategy to consolidate companies in the most promising digital economy sectors. The all-stock deal, valued at about $16.5 million, is expected to be completed by late February. SageMaker will complement more than a dozen associated companies in divine’s enterprise information portal solution. divine also will tap into relationships with its strategic partners, beginning with a separately announced strategic alliance with Computer Associates to jointly develop and market a combined portal solution. divine will integrate CA’s Jasmine( Portal technology with SageMaker’s offerings and the applications and services of other divine associated companies to create a complete enterprise information portal. www.divineinterventures.com, www.sagemaker.com

SDL plc announced that it has agreed to acquire the Automated Real Time Translation Division from Transparent Language, Inc. for a total consideration of $9m. The assets being acquired by SDL International include the intellectual property rights to Transparent’s TranscendRT* machine translation technology and related products, including the Enterprise Translation Server, which provide instant language translation of e-mail, web pages, and documents. The consideration will be satisfied with the payment of $1.5m in cash and through the issue of $7.5m in new ordinary shares of 1p each in the Capital of the Company. The division being acquired made a net loss of $3.7 million for the nine months ended 31 December 2000, which reflects the costs of developing and launching the TranscendRT* technology. The acquisition is expected to be completed by 15th February 2001. The Directors of SDL International believe that combining the Enterprise Translation Server’s real time translation technology with SDL International’s products SDLX and SDLWebFlow will enable the Company to provide a complete solution for companies to manage multilingual web site content. The combination of SDL International’s expertise in computer-aided translation via its translation memory product SDLX with the high performance Enterprise Translation Server will provide a commercial solution in the field of automated translation. www.sdlintl.com, www.transparentlanguage.com

Convera announced the release of Convera RetrievalWare 6.8 and RetrievalWare WebExpress 2.1, featuring new multimedia content management capabilities and enhancements. These include enhanced support for Java developers, a new search interface for intranet users, added capabilities for indexing secure content, expanded language plug-ins and support for the latest versions of operating systems and databases. With the new Java Server Page Toolkit (JSPTK), Convera enables Java developers to rapidly deploy RetrievalWare and WebExpress search capability into Java server page applications. RetrievalWare 6.8 also offers a new user interface for intranet search users called SmartSearch. Also new to RetrievalWare 6.8 is Spider support for HTTPS/SSL protocol, enabling organizations to use the RetrievalWare Spider to index secure content. Updated dictionaries enhance search results by accommodating language changes such as new words and idioms and updated spellings. Expanded support for Chinese (simple and traditional), Portuguese, Russian and Arabic has been added to provide additional functionality in these markets. Japanese, Korean, Italian and Dutch, which had limited availability in earlier releases of RetrievalWare, are now generally available. The RetrievalWare Internet Spider has the ability to follow “automatic redirects” or links that automatically direct the user to another URL. Automatic redirects are a common technique used to manage web traffic. RetrievalWare and Web Express have extended its platform support to Windows 2000 Server. In the Unix market the HP-11 64-bit OS is now supported and upgrades to AIX 4.3 and DEC Unix 4.0f are now available. The synchronizer for Lotus Notes now supports version 5 of that product. Convera RetrievalWare 6.8 and RetrievalWare WebExpress 2.1 are now available on Windows NT Intel, NT Alpha and all major UNIX platforms. www.convera.com

Percussion Software announced a technology partnership with ScreamingMedia. Under the terms of the partnership, Percussion and ScreamingMedia will jointly market an integrated content management solution that enables companies to simultaneously create, manage and deploy content to the Web and other channels using one content management and publishing solution. Together, Percussion’s Rhythmyx Content Manager and ScreamingMedia’s SiteWare will simplify the process of acquiring relevant content from ScreamingMedia sources and transforming that content for any delivery mechanism. ScreamingMedia uses its infrastructure technology platform to aggregate, filter, process and integrate content from more than 3,000 brand-name publications directly into their network of more than 1,300 web and wireless subscribers. Content is filtered according to client specifications and then integrated seamlessly into the customer’s site. Visitors are never linked off-site, making the subscriber site “stickier.” Rhythmyx Content Manager automates content creation, approval and delivery for company Web. With the workflow capabilities in the Rhythmyx solution, the content from ScreamingMedia services can be reviewed, approved and assembled with other content items to produce pages specifically for the target Web sites. www.percussion.com, www.screamingmedia.com

Starbase Corporation announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire worldweb.net, Inc. worldweb.net, Inc. The acquisition positions Starbase in the multi-billion dollar market of software products for the creation and management of code and content. The transaction, valued at $26.0 million, consists of approximately $560,000 cash and 8.3 million shares of Starbase common stock valued at $25.4 million, based on the closing price of Starbase common stock as of February 9, 2001. The transaction, which is expected to close within one week, brings together code and content management technologies making Web site design, development and deployment more efficient, affordable and accessible. In addition to the planned integration of StarTeam and Expressroom I/O, Starbase will also separately market the Expressroom I/O content management solution to Global 2000 organizations. www.worldweb.net, www.starbase.com

Infoteria announced that its iXSLT 2.0 product has been integrated into the latest version of Altova’s XML Spy 3.5 product. XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) processors are generally used to convert XML to HTML because browsers and applications used in today’s market do not yet fully support XML and XSL files. XSLT processors can also transform XML documents into other XML formats for use by other systems. XML Spy 3.5 includes the recently updated version of Infoteria’s iXSLT product, version 2.0c. iXSLT has been upgraded to support Windows NT (Service Pack 4) and Windows 2000 operating system platforms. It includes XSL File syntax that is compliant with the latest XSLT recommendation (November 16, 1999). Other enhancements include the support of XSLT and XPATH Extension Elements; new options for testing performance (“-t” switch); new options for handling external entities (“-g” and “-G” switches); and significant performance improvements. iXSLT is a W3C-compliant XSLT processor that uses files to transform XML data. It can transform a single source of XML data into multiple formats for use by personal computers, personal digital assistants, cellular devices, and game machines. www.infoteria.com, www.xmlspy.com