Category: Content technology news (Page 555 of 637)

Lumeria, an infomediary incubator, announced the launch of DTD.com, a site for web software developers that combines a web repository for XML DTDs with a web-based tool for editing and creating DTDs. DTD.com offers web developers two free benefits. First, DTD.com provides the XML community with a free knowledge repository — called the DTDwarehouse — for storing and sharing DTDs and information about each DTD. Secondly, DTD.com gives away a free web-based knowledge management application, called the DTDfactory, which lets XML developers mine the data in the DTDwarehouse, create their own DTDs, validate them against industry standards, and share their knowledge of DTDs with other developers. With the goal of becoming a standard repository for all DTDs, DTD.com enables XML developers to upload their own DTDs — whether entire DTDs or suggested tags — to the DTDwarehouse to share with other developers. DTD.com will also aggregate these DTDs or tags and submit them for approval by the appropriate standards committees as a way of accelerating the standardization of XML. The DTDwarehouse is stocked with over 180 DTDs covering a wide range of subjects, from mathematics to science, government, education, and personal profiling. In addition, DTD.com supports Lumeria’s proposed new standard for personal profiling, called the Profile Markup Language (PML) — an extremely rich profile description and exchange platform, which is based on XML. PML is an open source, industry-driven, XML-based collection of standards for defining profile data. At the heart of PML is the PML DTD — the set of rules by which PML documents are created and interpreted. Lumeria created PML in a drive to initiate an industry-wide movement to enable the flow of profile information across platforms and applications, and thereby save both consumers and businesses time and money. To encourage the widespread use of XML, Lumeria gives away PML for free to all developers and sets up a database of XML DTDs by subject. To encourage the use of PML, Lumeria has made the protocol compatible not only with its own SuperProfile Identity Management system but also with the upcoming Consumer Profile Exchange (CPEX) protocol and data model. Lumeria is a member of the CPEX core working group, which includes Oracle, IBM, Vignette, net.Genesis, Andromedia, and the Sun-Netscape Alliance. www.lumeria.com

eGlyphs Inc. announced the launch of Everymail, a free web-based email service that allows users to compose emails in over 28 different languages. Also announced is the simultaneous launch of Everychat, where users can chat with friends in their own language. eGlyphs’ proprietary Unicode-compatible ActiveX-based technology allows users to type text in over 28 languages. Users can type both left-to-right (English, Spanish, Thai, etc.) and right-to-left languages (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.) on the same line within an email. The supported languages include Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Persian, Russian, Greek, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Urdu, Bulgarian, Danish, Czech, Turkish, Swedish, Icelandic, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, Slovenian, Croatian, Flemish, Polish, Romanian and English. Hindi, Japanese and Chinese are due out shortly. Users register for free and begin composing multilingual emails. Recipients can view the emails sent from an Everymail account on any Windows machine via most email solutions (Outlook, Netscape, etc.) including all web-based email services. www.everymail.com, www.everychat.com

RealNetworks Inc. announced support for the W3C’s second working draft to advance the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) standard, known as SMIL Boston. This latest step forward in SMIL Boston builds upon the widespread adoption of SMIL as the integration language for Web-based multimedia. The SMIL Boston second working draft proposes extensions to the W3C approved SMIL 1.0 standard, based on feedback from thousands of SMIL 1.0 developers and tens of millions of consumer users and more than a billion SMIL presentations played on the Web since May 1998. Current members of the W3C Working Group developing SMIL Boston are key international industry players in Web multimedia, interactive television and audio/video streaming. In alphabetical order, they are: Canon, Compaq, CSELT, CWI, France Telecom, Gateway, GLOCOM, INRIA, Intel, Macromedia, Microsoft, Oratrix, NIST, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, RealNetworks and WGBH. SMIL is one of the key enabling technologies of Real.com Take 5, the Web’s daily programming service providing consumers with access to entertainment, music and news content on the Internet. Additionally, more than 100 channel partners on the Real.com Network offer SMIL presentations everyday to their consumers providing a more interactive experience on the Web. SMIL Boston modularizes SMIL functionality, providing standards based integration of SMIL functionality with other XML based languages and applications. Content authors and application developers both benefit from this flexibility: application developers can integrate needed functionality while content authors are able to build on their existing knowledge base. www.realnetworks.com

PictureWorks Technology, Inc. announced it has applied for an U.S. Patent for its Web based media submission invention that serves as the front-end to the company’s Rimfire Internet imaging platform. PictureWorks Rimfire, which was released in April this year, processes tens of millions of images and media items for the company’s Web site partners with volume levels expected to double by year-end. Rimfire’s Web based media submission technology is a multi-platform, media agnostic technology that makes submitting rich media to Web sites `drag and drop simple’. The submission technology provides several unique and valuable functions for both end users and PictureWorks’ Web site partners. First, it lets the user either drag and drop a file from a flash card, CD, floppy or hard disk directly into a Web page, or the user can browse a directory to select a file to submit to the Web page. Secondly, the technology gives the user an opportunity to confirm the submission with a visual representation, for example by generating a thumbnail image of the rich media file that has been selected. Additionally, batch submission is provided to allow a user to drag and drop or select multiple media objects into a Web page. Submission from a Web page to a Web page is also provided for. Critical to meeting the diverse needs of different Web site’s, the submission tool is completely configurable. It is able to perform a variety of intelligent preprocessing on media objects prior to upload, for example, sizing, formatting, cropping, rotating, lightening or darkening. Additional information is captured when the media objects are submitted. The submission of information about the user and the media objects facilitates automatic integration of the media objects within existing databases. www.pictureworks.com

Tumbleweed Communications Corp. and Worldtalk Corporation jointly announced Tumbleweed has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Worldtalk. With the addition of Worldtalk, Tumbleweed enters the e-mail content filtering space, another rapidly growing sector in messaging. Worldtalk, which introduced its first e-mail content filtering solution in 1997, has grown its 1999 year-to-date revenue for this product family more than 180% over the same period in 1998, from $1.7 million to $4.9 million. Worldtalk’s technologies will enhance Tumbleweed’s Integrated Messaging Exchange (IME) the infrastructure companies use for both business-to-business and business to consumer online communications. When combined with Worldtalk’s WorldSecure e-mail content filtering products, IME enables customers to centrally define and enforce policies that drive new traffic across IME. Upon the completion of the transaction, Worldtalk will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Tumbleweed. Under the terms of the agreement, Worldtalk shareholders will receive a fixed exchange ratio of 0.26 Tumbleweed common shares for each share of Worldtalk common stock. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2000. www.tumbleweed.com, www.worldtalk.com

Infoteria Inc. announced its support for Microsoft’s BizTalk Framework. BizTalk Framework will appear in upcoming Infoteria products such as XML Solution Components and XML Schema Design Service such as MML (Medical Markup Language) released by the Japan Association for Medical Informatics (JAMI). Infoteria’s announcement of support today is the first by a Japanese company. www.infoteria.com