iSpeech.org, text to speech software as a service (SaaS) company, announced its services are now available to anyone using the Box.net platform. The integration allows Box customers to instantly listen to documents with a few clicks of the mouse. This software-free feature is available through simple Web menus. The integration marks the first deployment of a text to speech Web service with an online content storage and collaboration platform. iSpeech brings text to speech to over 50,000 businesses currently using Box.net. Business and people can now have instant audio access to any document containing text. The resulting audio files can be used to help employees or students absorb information faster and, “even during their commute”. iSpeech usage is available in various packages ranging from a free ad-supported voice to the use of premium voices for $7.85 per month. Customers are able to try premium voices free for 15 days. The resulting audio files can be downloaded as MP3s, podcasted to iTunes, or embedded. http://www.ispeech.org/, http://www.box.net/
Category: Content technology news (Page 164 of 624)
Curated information technology news for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. News items are edited to remove hype, unhelpful jargon, iffy statements, and quotes, to create a short summary — mostly limited to 200 words — of the important facts with a link back to a useful source for more information. News items are published using the date of the original source here and in our weekly email newsletter.
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Amazon and Lexcycle announce that Amazon has aquired Ebook Firm Lexcycle, Inc., developers of the iphone eBook reader. Both companies said there are no plans to change the development of Stanza. According to Lexcycle’s founder Marc Prud’hommeau, “We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers. We are excited to join forces with a company that has innovated on behalf of readers for over a decade and is a pioneer in ebooks. Like Amazon, we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead for ebooks and we could not think of a better company to join during this exciting time”. http://www.lexcycle.com/lexcycle_acquired_by_amazon
Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU.) announced a new solution that allows businesses to automatically record and archive dynamic website content. Designed to address the complex regulatory requirements for businesses presenting dynamic content on the web, the solution combines Autonomy Digital Safe with Interwoven TeamSite to form an offering for including web content in a comprehensive compliance policy. Autonomy leverages the capabilities of its Digital Safe Archive and TeamSite web content management solution to provide an automated, secure, and scalable solution that helps businesses meet the compliance requirements of the modern web. For example, an insurance company can now produce a record of the exact premiums it offered online to a particular segment of customers during a marketing campaign conducted several months ago. Digital Safe is a hosted archive service that enables customers to outsource the storage and management of email messages, rich-media files, audio files, instant messages, and all forms of web content. TeamSite’s web versioning capabilities enable businesses to capture snapshots of content delivered to customers at exact points in time, including rolling back to content delivered several months or years ago. This information can now be ingested and indexed by Digital Safe to help organizations meet strict eDiscovery and audit compliance requirements, including COBS 11.8 (Conduct of Business), SEC/FINRA regulations, and the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act. This solution is available now. http://www.interwoven.com/, http://www.autonomy.com
Vasont Systems announced the release of the next major version of their content management system, Vasont 12, that enables users to store multilingual content once for maximum reuse and delivery to multiple channels. Vasont 12 includes: Collaborative Review package provides effective virtual collaboration with colleagues. Internal and external reviewers markup content with changes and comments while seeing other reviewers’ feedback simultaneously. Accepted changes automatically update in Vasont, minimizing manual updates; Project Management tracks projects to meet publishing deadlines. The Project Management window provides overall statuses of workflow projects across multiple departments and highlights overdue projects. When needed, users can inquire for specific status information. Gantt charts provide a graphical view of project timelines; Translation package consolidates translation project information in one window. Vasont’s Translation Projects window provides tracking and status for each multi-language translation project. Translation coordinators submit projects to multiple vendors for quote or translation. Integrations with translation vendors automate content delivery and status information to/from Vasont; Preview feature provides a styled view of XML content. Vasont’s Preview displays content in a styled view to speed up editorial time by making content easy to read; Content Ownership increases content security. Specific pieces of content within a collection are restricted to alterations by its Content Owners while other users can only view it. Associate Administrators role provides flexibility to coordinate administrative responsibilities across multiple groups, and more. This release is available on May 1, 2009 for both the client/server and hosted (SaaS) models. http://www.vasont.com
X1 Technologies, Inc. announced the availability of two product releases. The first is the 6.2.4 release of the X1 Professional Client which is available for immediate download. This release of the X1 Professional Client focuses on IBM Lotus Notes and Mozilla Thunderbird improvements along with general maintenance. The 1.3.1 release of the X1 Content Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault delivers query search results that are twice as fast as the previous release when searching for email, email attachments and files that are archived within Symantec Enterprise Vault. Additional Unicode support has also been added to the 1.3.1 release. X1 delivers a combination of products that allow knowledge workers to search, preview and act upon data anywhere in the enterprise from a single, interface. With X1, individuals and businesses can search “virtually everything” that exists on the PC and server in nearly 500 file types and applications, including email solutions such as Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint, Symantec Enterprise Vault and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. http://www.x1.com
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group updated the Candidate Recommendation of “Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification.” CSS 2.1 is a style sheet language that allows authors and users to attach style (e.g., fonts and spacing) to structured documents (e.g., HTML documents and XML applications). CSS 2.1 corrects a few errors in CSS2 (the most important being a new definition of the height/width of absolutely positioned elements, more influence for HTML’s “style” attribute and a new calculation of the ‘clip’ property), and adds a few highly requested features which have already been widely implemented. But most of all CSS 2.1 represents a “snapshot” of CSS usage: it consists of all CSS features that are implemented interoperably. This draft incorporates errata resulting from implementation experience since the previous publication. http://www.w3.org/Style/
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group has published a Working Draft of “HTML 5.” HTML 5 adds to the language of the Web features to help Web application authors, new elements based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability. This particular draft specifies how authors can embed SVG in non-XML text/html content, and how browsers and other UAs should handle such embedded SVG content. See also the news about moving some parts of HTML 5 to individual drafts. The ” full list of changes” since the previous draft are listed in the updated companion document “HTML 5 differences from HTML 4.” http://www.w3.org/html/wg/
The W3C OWL Working Group has published new Working Drafts for OWL 2, a language for building Semantic Web ontologies. An ontology is a set of terms that a particular community finds useful for organizing data (e.g., for data about a book, useful terms include “title” and “author”). OWL 2 (a compatible extension of “OWL 1″ ) consists of 13 documents (7 technical, 4 instructional, and 2 group Notes). For descriptions and links to all the documents, see the ” OWL 2 Documentation Roadmap.” This is a “Last Call” for the technical materials and is an opportunity for the community to confirm that these documents satisfy requirements for an ontology language. This is a second Last Call for six of the documents, but because the changes since the first Last Call are limited in scope, the review period lasts only 21 days. For an introduction to OWL 2, see the four instructional documents: an “overview,” “primer,” “list of new features,” and “quick reference.” http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL, http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-owl2-new-features-20090421/
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