ec-Content, Inc. announced the availability of its MRO content library, and content acquisition, management and maintenance offerings for B2B Net marketplaces, and introduced its Supplier Neutral Content methodology for managing and maintaining value-added content. A provider of comprehensive MRO content with a management and maintenance solution, ec-Content partners with Net marketplaces looking to increase the effectiveness of their online catalogs to attract and retain more buyers. Because no two suppliers, manufacturers or wholesalers collect, maintain and present content in exactly the same way, buyers often find there are many sources for price and product information coming from a single manufacturer or supplier, making it difficult to locate and purchase items. The acquisition and maintenance of electronic catalog content, and the ability to offer item cross-referencing are daunting tasks that require marketplaces to aggregate hundreds of thousands of items with different attributes, from different catalogs. ec-Content removes the burden of these tasks by providing Net marketplaces with access to a centralized content library of 5.2 million items, supporting tens of millions of SKUs, across 40,000 suppliers that can be customized to reflect buyers’ negotiated prices for each supplier. The complex MRO content is cleaned, normalized and standardized, then maintained on a scalable database. By outsourcing content management to ec-Content, buying organizations eliminate the need to track their purchases through hundreds of paper catalogs containing items with different attributes and often outdated pricing. ec-Content’s value-added content includes enhanced product descriptions, images, common identifiers, and current pricing information updated on a regularly scheduled basis. In addition, ec-Content provides quality assurance services including the ongoing tracking of anomalies, discontinued items and pricing changes, that improve Net marketplace content and in turn, makes the marketplace more valuable to its customers. To effectively manage the electronic catalog content needed by Net marketplaces, ec-Content assigns a universal number to each item in their database, and maps that identifier to corresponding supplier part numbers and commodity codes. The solution behind ec-Content’s Supplier Neutral Content is the Content Overlay Process that essentially overlays supplier catalogs that include varying descriptions for identical products. This eliminates the need for Net marketplaces to input multiple product descriptions from multiples suppliers, establishing a scalable process for managing and maintaining customized catalogs. www.eccontent.com
Category: Content technology news (Page 519 of 641)
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.
We focus on product news, but also include selected company news such as mergers and acquisitions and meaningful partnerships. All news items are edited by one of our analysts under the NewsShark byline. See our Editorial Policy.
Note that we also publish news on X/Twitter. Follow us @gilbane
Intel Corporation and Excalibur Technologies Corporation announced that they have signed an agreement to form a new company that will enable owners of branded high-value content, such as sports and entertainment, to produce and securely sell their audio and video content over the Internet. The new company will offer a compelling, one-stop solution with key Internet technologies. Under the terms of the agreement, Intel will contribute its Interactive Media Services division and invest $150 million in exchange for 60 percent of the new company’s equity. Intel will take a 49 percent position in the voting stock of the new company and the balance of its investment in non-voting stock. Excalibur will combine its entire business operations with those of the new company, with Excalibur stockholders receiving 40 percent ownership in the new company in exchange for their Excalibur stock. Excalibur shareholders will receive one share of stock in the new company for each share they hold of Excalibur. Holders of 29 percent of Excalibur’s outstanding voting stock have agreed to vote in favor of the transaction. Other financial details were not disclosed. Compatible technologies and business models do not exist from one company in a fully integrated way that enable branded, valuable content to be delivered to subscribers over the Internet. The new company will seek to solve this problem by combining Excalibur’s market-leading content management technologies for producing valuable media archives with Intel’s patented technology for content protection. The transaction is subject to regulatory review, Excalibur stockholder approval and other normal closing conditions. All other necessary corporate approvals have been obtained by Excalibur and Intel. Completion of the transaction and the new company’s launch is expected in the third quarter of this year. Ronald J. Whittier will resign from Intel to become chairman of the board and CEO of the new company. Patrick C. Condo will become president and COO. www.intel.com, www.excalib.com
Bluestone Software, Inc. announced General Availability for Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB Version 7.0, its 100% Pure Java Application Server deployment engine which is the heart of its Sapphire/Web and its Integration Server, Bluestone XML Suite, as well as the foundation of its newest product line, Total-e-Business platform. Based entirely on Sun’s J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) specification and using XML as its internal communication vehicle, Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB establishes an infrastructure foundation for enterprise-class e-business applications. Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB is the next generation of the Sapphire/Universal Business Server, the application deployment architecture that powers the company’s Sapphire/Web Application Server framework. As a result, the Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB brings performance, scalability, fault tolerance and XML services to the company’s forthcoming Total-e-Business platform editions, including Total-e-Global, Total-e-B2B, Total-e-B2C, Total-e-Wireless, and Total-e-Server, scheduled for release later in Q2 of this year. The J2EE foundation fortifies Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB with implementations of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 1.1, Java Servlets 2.2, and JavaServer Pages (JSP) 1.1, including Taglib support. Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB also includes a complete implementation of Java Servlets API 2.2 to provide a standard mechanism for building dynamic Web applications that are portable across hardware, Web server, and Application Server platforms. Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB relies on XML for a number of services, including the persistence map that permanently stores the state of an application. XML gives the Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB high-performance support for fine-grained objects in an EJB. The Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB also employs a dynamic XSL engine that lets users automatically detect client device types and generate the proper delivery format, whether it is a cell phone, palmtop device, desktop browser, B2B application, or other client type. Bluestone Universal Business Server for TeB is available today in Sapphire/Web, Bluestone XML Suite, and Total-e-Business.www.bluestone.com
Remedy Corp. and Requisite Technology, Inc. announced a strategic alliance to add Requisite’s e-content tools to the Remedy Purchasing@Work eProcurement solution. Remedy will embed Requisite’s patented BugsEye finding engine and eMerge content management toolset into Remedy Purchasing@Work. BugsEye is an intuitive, natural-language finding engine that lets users quickly find and select the products they need, without forcing them to learn the specialized rules of the underlying data structure. eMerge tools and services enable buyers and suppliers to create and manage dynamic e-catalogs. To help buying organizations realize bottom line savings in record time, Remedy will offer a “quick start” e-content program. Customers will be able to select suppliers for office products, paper, industrial supplies, software and other items from Requisite’s eLeader supplier network. www.requisite.com, www.remedy.com
NetSanity, Inc. announced an aggressive plan to create a standards-based platform for the delivery of web content to mobile devices. The new technology will deliver a user’s favorite web-based information onto any wireless device that is mobile-Internet ready. This month, Nokia and NetSanity will demonstrate the delivery of Digital Pebbles, or pieces of Internet information, to WAP-enabled mobile phones. NetSanity also announced that over 70 content partners and 1500 affiliates have adopted NetSanity’s XML application, making their content immediately available on the NetSanity SmartBar, NetSanity’s current Windows desktop product — and soon on mobile devices. Over the next few months, NetSanity plans to partner with additional wireless hardware manufacturers and telecom carriers to offer NetSanity technology on a variety of mobile devices. www.netsanity.com, www.nokia.com
Google Inc. announced the beta availability of a new version of its search engine optimized for wireless phone and handheld computer users. Available now, users of WAP mobile telephones and Palm handhelds connected to a wireless modem can now search the web using Google while on the go. This wireless technology marks the availability of a search engine that brings the entire World Wide Web to mobile devices. With less than 1 percent of websites available in Wireless Markup Language (WML), Google offers mobile users the ability to view and browse traditional HTML websites. Unlike other search engines that index only web pages that are available in WML, Google brings more than 500 million web pages to the palm of a user’s hand. When a wireless user requests a traditional HTML page, Google’s innovative technology translates the requested HTML document on the fly into WML. Interested users can type “Google” into their WAP microbrowser, or can enter www.google.com. Palm users can visit www.google.com/palm to access this special wireless version of Google. Although still in beta, mobile web surfers will have complete access to the Google search engine, including an easy-to-use interface, quick loading pages, and highly relevant search results. Google supports access by any common Internet-ready mobile device and microbrowser. www.google.com
Xerox Corporation and Microsoft Corp. joined forces to launch ContentGuard, Inc., a new Internet company that will deliver comprehensive software solutions to protect and manage books, documents, music, software and other valuable content distributed over the Web. The solutions give publishers and authors more control over their digital material, thus allowing them unprecedented freedom and innovation in delivering and marketing digital content to consumers. ContentGuard, Inc.’s technology, originally developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), is the foundation for various products and services to deliver secure, user-friendly solutions for protecting and distributing digital content over the Internet. These digital rights management (DRM) solutions are designed to allow content developers and publishers to establish and retain control over how their materials are used, copied and purchased. Xerox will retain a majority stake in ContentGuard, Inc., formerly the Xerox Rights Management group. Microsoft will be a minority investor, and other investors are expected to be announced in the future. ContentGuard, Inc., Microsoft and Xerox also will collaborate on future development of DRM technology and standards, including the establishment of XrML (eXtensible rights Markup Language) as a common standard for all forms of digital information and entertainment. XrML will be licensed royalty-free to the industry to enable interoperability across rights management systems. Microsoft will use ContentGuard’s technology to extend future versions of Microsoft’s DRM solutions. Microsoft Reader, a new software product for displaying eBooks, will be the first Microsoft product to incorporate the ContentGuard technology when it debuts this summer. ContentGuard technology will also enhance future releases of Windows Media Player and Windows Media Rights Manager. The ContentGuard portfolio includes the ContentGuard Internet content protection software suite and the electronic Publishing Clearing Service (ePCS) offered jointly with Reciprocal Inc. Today ContentGuard can protect and manage digital content such as market research, business reports, patent applications, books, sheet music and academic course packs. Plans are under way to enable DRM solutions for audio and video material. In addition, ContentGuard products and services enable publishers or authors to deploy materials over the Web in new ways; for example, to create free time-restricted previews, single-chapter previews or one-time use scenarios. www.xerox.com, www.microsoft.com
SoftQuad Software, Ltd. announced MarketAgility, an XML-based content solution that gives businesses more power and control over the creation, management and real-time delivery of product information to e-marketplaces and e-procurement systems. MarketAgility provides suppliers with an efficient and cost-effective way to move product information from their enterprises to multiple electronic distribution channels. MarketAgility 1.0, formerly code named Global OnRamp, is scheduled for release in September, 2000. Suppliers until now have had trouble collecting their product information, which has generally been located in disparate sources throughout their enterprises. It’s also been difficult to translate that information into the various distinct formats required by different e-marketplaces. Even after these initial barriers have been overcome, suppliers have still found it hard to maintain up-to-date product and pricing information and to target and differentiate their products across multiple distribution channels. MarketAgility lets suppliers quickly leverage their existing infrastructure and business processes to collect product information from wherever it resides in the enterprise, whether in content management systems, electronic resource planning systems, enterprise databases, or Microsoft Word or Excel files. It then automatically delivers this information in a format that is fully customized for different e-markets in their specific dialect of XML. In addition, MarketAgility allows suppliers to maintain their competitive advantage by rapidly and incrementally updating product and pricing information across all channels. MarketAgility is comprised of three major components: the MarketAgility XML Connector, the MarketAgility XML Server, and the MarketAgility XML Transporter. MarketAgility also incorporates SoftQuad’s XMetaL technology, an enabler for XML content applications. MarketAgility allows content revisions to be made directly within XML. Suppliers can now easily supplement their product data with rich content and better differentiate themselves in e-markets. MarketAgility supports common industry standards such as BizTalk, W3C Schemas, xCBL and cXML. www.softquad.com
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
