Open Market, Inc. announced that Open Market’s content management products will offer native support for IBM WebSphere Application Server, a key part of IBM’s WebSphere software platform, and IBM’s DB2 Universal Database by the end of this year. Open Market’s Content Server and associated applications, Content Centre, Personalization Centre, Catalog Centre, and Marketing Studio, already offer native support for a variety of J2EE compliant application servers. Open Market also has become a participant in IBM’s Solution Investment Initiative. Open Market’s relationship with IBM focuses on the financial, new media and manufacturing markets. IBM and Open Market are already working together to provide solutions for a variety of businesses. Open Market’s Content Server and related applications are built using the J2EE framework, leveraging standardized modular, reusable components along with J2EE services such as database connectivity, and load balancing. Open Market’s suite is based on Java and XML. www.openmarket.com

Interwoven, Inc. and Bluestone Software, Inc. announced that they are collaborating to create next-generation content syndication services. Interwoven has agreed to license certain components of Bluestone’s J2EE-based platform as the foundation for extensions to Interwoven’s syndication offering. Together, Interwoven and Bluestone will develop these extensions to enable high volume content exchange. Interwoven’s content syndication solutions intend to address many key challenges faced by e-business application providers; for example, the ability to dynamically access and syndicate assets directly from the content repositories to multiple application delivery systems. These syndication solutions will build upon Interwoven’s open, standards-based content management and replication technologies, and will leverage the subscription database and scheduling services offered by Bluestone’s J2EE-based platform. In addition, Interwoven’s syndication extensions will enjoy Bluestone’s implementation of a J2EE-based platform including Enterprise JavaBeans 1.1, which Bluestone has enhanced with global-class services. These services include XML persistence mapping, Dynamic XSL Stylesheets, load balancing, application management, security, as well as Universal Listener Framework (ULF) scheduling services. Performance-oriented facilities unique to Bluestone, such as Customer Facing Fault Tolerance, Internet Quality of Service (IQS), and Hot Versioning are also included as part of the license agreement. www.interwoven.com, www.bluestone.com

SoftQuad Software, Ltd. announced a strategic technology partnership with ec-Content. The partnership will combine SoftQuad MarketAgility, a supply side e-catalog solution, with ec-Content’s ability to create enhanced catalog content, allowing suppliers to deliver customer-specific catalogs to e-markets quickly and efficiently. Suppliers who want to effectively participate in e-marketplaces must overcome the challenges involved in creating, updating and delivering content rich catalogs with buyer-specific pricing information to multiple e-marketplaces. This requires collecting product and pricing information from enterprise systems, adding up-to-date product descriptions and graphics from manufacturers, and delivering each e-catalog in the XML format required by each e-marketplace. The combination of MarketAgility and ec-Content will provide suppliers with an integrated solution to rapidly create buyer-specific catalogs, normalize the data for consistency, enrich it with manufacturer information, and distribute it to e-markets. For suppliers, this enables them to bring their customized e-catalogs online quickly. For e-marketplace users, this ensures a rich buying experience by enabling them to quickly and efficiently find the products they need with accurate product and pricing information. ec-Content maintains a base of product information on over five million individual items from thousands of manufacturers, and provides management and maintenance services to expand and update this information for marketplaces and suppliers. ec-Content enhances suppliers’ catalog content by overlaying it with manufacturers’ comprehensive and current product information. ec-Content’s high quality e-catalog libraries are then published in the required format to each e-marketplace. www.ec-content.com, www.softquad.com

Bertelsmann and iSyndicate have announced the agreement of a European joint venture that will provide content syndication services and technology to media properties throughout Europe. The joint venture will combine Bertelsmann’s global media network with iSyndicate’s syndication expertise and relationships with more than 1100 independent content providers to deliver syndicated media to Web sites of all sizes and wireless devices. Each partner will hold a 50 percent stake in the joint venture enterprise operating as ‘iSyndicate Europe’. The company’s headquarters will be located in Hamburg, Germany with iSyndicate’s existing London office serving as the first affiliate office. Bertelsmann has the right to appoint the CEO of iSyndicate Europe. Under the terms of the agreement, Bertelsmann will acquire a four percent stake in US-based parent company iSyndicate Inc. Bertelsmann’s Chief Creative Officer Rolf Schmidt-Holtz will also join iSyndicate’s board. iSyndicate’s other strategic partnerships include NBC, Microsoft, NewsCorp, InfoSpace and Vignette. iSyndicate Europe will enable web sites of all sizes, corporate intranets and digital devices to enrich their content offerings with services and media from the widely recognizable publishing brands. iSyndicate Europe will syndicate a wide range of independent content providers in addition to Bertelsmann media properties, enabling content providers to generate increased revenue and brand awareness. www.isyndicate.com, www.bertelsmann.de

Intershop and Autonomy Corporation plc announced the availability of the Autonomy cartridge for Intershop enfinity. The Autonomy cartridge for Intershop enfinity adds functionality to help businesses create a more compelling and convenient online shopping experience with personalized information that is tailored to the individual needs of the user. By analyzing and deriving the meaning from any piece of text, Autonomy’s pattern recognition technology can automatically categorize and link similar information (for example product descriptions) to deliver highly customized shopping information to the customer. Key features of the Autonomy cartridge for Intershop enfinity include the ability to recommend a range of products and services based on the automatic profiling of users’ preferences, the automatic suggestion of recommended alternatives and a natural language search facility. The Autonomy cartridge for Intershop enfinity for Windows NT is available worldwide through Autonomy. www.automony.com, www.intershop.com

eBusiness Technologies and ScreamingMedia announced a joint technology alliance. Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will integrate eBusiness Technologies’ workflow and Web content management solutions and ScreamingMedia’s SiteWare technology platform for the aggregation and distribution of real-time digital content. The companies will also enter into joint sales and marketing activities. The partnership will bring customized content to portals and corporate intranets by allowing ScreamingMedia’s live news feeds to be incorporated dynamically into customers’ web sites. Select content offered through SiteWare can be routed through eBusiness Technologies’ content management tools and published side-by-side with articles submitted by other content contributors. Because news article selection is integrated with in-house content creation, the overall publishing process is streamlined and editorial review time is decreased. www.screamingmedia.com, www.ebt.com

NITF is an XML-based DTD designed for the markup and delivery of news content in a variety of ways, including print, wireless devices and the Web. It was developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council, an international consortium of news providers, and the Newspaper Association of America, Reston, Va. The standards groups first released NITF in spring 1999, and an NITF Maintenance Committee has made a number of improvements since then. NITF and NewsML. Both the NITF and the NewsML wrapper can be stand alone but may also be used in a complimentary manner as NITF objects can be moved within and managed by NewsML in a multimedia environment. NewsML Version final is expected to be released next month. Among the changes: Clarification of language and time elements; Deprecation or removal of several unneeded HTML elements; Addition of an alternate code element (), for reference to an internal or external controlled vocabulary as a way of identifying a company, organization or person, among other things. A new website contains extensive material on the revised DTD, including a tutorial, dynamic documentation, links to discussion forums and of course the DTD itself (with or without documentation). Also posted is a link to the IPTC’s Subject Code list, for identifying the content of news material in any media. An updated version of the News Industry Text Format is now posted at www.nitf.org.