Ektron, Inc. has launched Ektron CMS300. This browser-based system offers content management capabilities with WYSIWYG XML editing functionality. Ektron CMS300 delivers the same features found in Ektron’s other content management solutions, including intuitive work areas for contributors and administrators, scalable workflow, an advanced permissions model, and an Explorer-like content folder design. It includes the browser-based WYSIWYG XML editor, Ektron eWebEditPro+XML. Ektron CMS300 runs on Microsoft Windows servers, and works with several Web application servers including Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), ASP.NET, Macromedia ColdFusion or PHP. Ektron CMS300 is priced at US$4,999 to $19,999. www.ektron.com

X-Hive Corporation announced the release of version 4 of X-Hive/DB, its native XML database designed for software developers who need to process and store XML data in their applications. X-Hive/DB 4 offers performance improvements through the use of a new storage model for documents and indexes. Version 4 of X-Hive/DB also contains a new mechanism for live full text indexing of element and attribute values. The full text indexes can be used within XQuery to decrease the query execution time. X-Hive/DB 4 continues to offer the features of previous X-Hive/DB versions including a versatile and developer-friendly API, transaction mechanism, versioning, complete support for open standards, interfaces to third-party XML tools and J2EE connectivity. X-Hive/DB 4 is now available on Windows, Linux and Solaris. A free 30-day evaluation license is available. www.x-hive.com

Ancept, Inc., a provider of digital asset management (DAM) solutions announced support for the Adobe Graphics Server 2.0 imaging software. Integration of the Ancept Media Server with Adobe Graphics Server 2.0 will help graphics professionals and business users reduce image production time by enabling graphic file manipulation from any standard Web browser. This combined digital asset management and dynamic imaging solution helps clients effectively locate, prepare and repurpose digital brand imagery assets. www.Ancept.com

Fidelio Acquisition Company, LLC, a company formed by Sony Corporation of America, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics and certain other investors, has executed a definitive agreement to acquire InterTrust Technologies Corporation. As a result of the transaction, Fidelio will acquire all of the outstanding common stock of InterTrust for approximately $453 million on a fully diluted basis or $4.25 per share. InterTrust’s Board of Directors has unanimously approved the acquisition. All InterTrust board members owning shares have agreed to tender all their shares of InterTrust common stock, representing approximately 20% of the outstanding common stock, in favor of the transaction. The acquisition is expected to close in early 2003. www.sony.com/SCA/index.html, www.philips.com/newscenter

LightSpeed Software, Inc. announced that it has partnered with Entopia, Inc. to provide a classification engine that works with its Knowledge Builder tool. Entopia incorporated LightSpeed’s pre-classification engine in the Knowledge Builder in conjunction with its own development of a configurable document classification tool that enables users to customize the classification and taxonomy. The Knowledge Builder is coupled with Entopia Quantum to facilitate integration of legacy content by generating a taxonomy and extracting metadata from source documents and integrating them into Entopia Quantum, where they are searchable and part of the collaboration space. The LightSpeed Software classifier engine comes with a knowledge base of about a million topics or themes. LightSpeed uses its classification technology in its own suite of Business Information tools and licenses the software both OEMs and VARs. www.LSpeed.com, www.entopia.com

The World Wide Web Consortium announced the release of the XForms 1.0 Candidate Recommendation. XForms 1.0 is the foundation for next-generation Web-based forms, by combining the ability to separate purpose, presentation, and results with the XML. Advancement of this document to Candidate Recommendation is a statement that the specification is stable. The W3C XForms Working Group invites the Web development community at large to implement the specification and demonstrate interoperability. In contrast to HTML Forms, with functional and presentation markup intertwined, XForms lets forms authors distinguish the descriptions of the purpose of the form; the presentation of the form, and how the results (the instance data) are written in XML. By splitting traditional HTML forms into three parts — XForms model, instance data, and the XForms user interface — it cleanly separates presentation from content. Practically speaking, XForms technologies make it possible to use forms from a PDA, a cell phone, screen reader or conventional desktop machine – without loss of functionality for the end user. XForms, while initially designed to be integrated into XHTML, may be adopted by any suitable markup language, such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). www.w3.org

eXcelon Corporation announced the availability of XIS Lite, a fully functional version of the company’s native XML database management system, eXtensible Information Server (XIS). XIS Lite is designed to enable customers with less extensive data requirements to achieve dynamic, extensible and reliable data management at a lower cost of ownership. eXcelon developed XIS Lite for companies that are using XML business documents to build the foundation for web services applications and standards-based integration networks where resilience to change is required. XIS Lite provides additional ROI to developers and architects who deploy applications on XIS Lite by providing them with the ability to re-deploy those applications on full-scale XIS without requiring modifications to application-level code. XIS Lite is available immediately starting at $995 per developer seat. www.exln.com