Cascade Systems Inc. announced that it has signed a Letter of Agreement to merge with Pindar Systems. The two privately held companies, who expect the transaction to be completed by the end of January, plan to combine their engineering, marketing, and financial resources. E-merchandising represents an explosive market for the new millennium. Pindars’s catalog publishing products combined with Cascades’s e-merchandising technology will provide a powerful e-commerce solution covering web, print and e-mail. The National Retail Federation and International Data Corporation forecasts sales in e-merchandising to grow from $2 billion in 2000 to more than $8 billion in 2003. Although Internet commerce continues to grow at a rapid pace with anticipated revenues of $84 billion by 2004, print catalogs remain a big business. The Direct Marketing Association estimates print catalog sales will grow from $93 billion in 1999 to more than $125 billion by 2004. Both companies recognize the importance of continuity in shared product information databases as the key to effective print and electronic merchandising in the next century. www.cascadenet.com
Category: Content technology news (Page 557 of 640)
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.
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The e-content company, a division of Interleaf, announced two new additions to their growing roster of e-Partners. Tata Infotech, one of the largest information technology organizations in India, and SDI, a provider of knowledge-based services, will team with the e-content company to provide solutions with BladeRunner, the e-content company’s XML content management solution for e-business. Tata InfoTech and SDI are the most recent addition to the e-content company’s e-Partner Program. In addition to joining as a Consulting Partner, companies may also join as a Technology Provider, Platform Provider, Complementary Software Provider, Reseller, or OEM depending upon their area of expertise. Since it was introduced in January, several companies have joined the e-Partner Program such as Microsoft, NetPerceptions, UWI.Com, and Hewlett-Packard among others. www.xmlecontent.com
The Council for Internet Commerce today announced the opening of the second and final round of voting on the Standard for Internet Commerce, a codification of e-commerce best practices to increase consumer satisfaction, confidence and trust. Through Dec. 6, the public is encouraged to join the council’s founding members in their votes and shaping the content of the commerce standard. Consumers visiting the Commerce Standard site will be able to cast their votes in categories ranging from disclosure practices to customer support, in an easy-to-use multiple choice format. www.commercestandard.com
Eloquent, Inc., and Gilat Communications Ltd. announced a partnership to offer a joint business communications and distance learning solution. This solution leverages Gilat’s live broadcast and interactive capabilities and Eloquent’s on-demand rich media capabilities to provide a complete “live to on-demand” business communications and interactive learning platform. Gilat’s TrainNet is an IDL system which enables a live, interactive instructor-led classroom experience by providing full-screen, full-motion video broadcast to classrooms and individual PCs over broadband, LAN or Internet connections. TrainNet also features instantaneous application projection, collaboration tools and feedback buttons that enhance the communication and interaction between teacher and student. The TrainNet platform is a robust and fully scalable solution for both corporate as well as educational institutions. Eloquent’s rich media format-synchronized video, audio, text and graphics-will capture, organize, and archive live TrainNet sessions. Customers can now make TrainNet content available on demand over the Web at typical Internet bandwidths, extending the value of the original broadcast to students, employees, and partners who are not able to attend the live sessions. In addition, personalized, pre-event presentations from Eloquent enable participants with different backgrounds to prepare appropriately for TrainNet sessions. Eloquent’s rich media format and the Eloquent Enterprise Communications Portal Server also enable customers to create a fully searchable and navigable archive of TrainNet materials, extending their useful life and enhancing their value to the organization. www.eloquent.com
webMethods, Inc. announced strategic alliances with consulting firms Intelligroup, Inc. and Lante Corporation. As part of their expanding e-commerce practices, these consulting firms will incorporate webMethods B2B into their methodology and provide customers with a broad range of consulting and implementation services to execute B2B e-commerce strategies. webMethods B2B provides a business community integration platform that makes it possible for companies to pursue direct integration with trading partners, while also participating in emerging B2B Marketplaces such as mySAP.com, the Ariba Network and Clarus SupplierUniverse. webMethods B2B utilizes XML and open Web standards, such as RosettaNet, OAG, OBI and ACORD, to connect integrated business communities and enable companies to conduct business over the Internet with minimal stress to corporate resources and existing IT infrastructure. www.webMethods.com
The Open Group announced an agreement to serve as the certification authority for the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum’s world standard for wireless information and telephony services. For certification testing, The Open Group developed a test suite specification to ensure wireless vendors’ products are compliant with the WAP V1.1 specification. As the certification authority, The Open Group will develop and operate the certification program on behalf of the WAP Forum. The WAP Forum has a large number of specifications describing the functionality and specific coding requirements of wireless phones and other devices for WAP certification. The Open Group’s test suite measures conformance to the Wireless Markup Language (WML) application layer specifications, as well as WMLscript and WMLscript libraries. The certification test uses a WML server that delivers tests that run on the devices or phones, and performs a functionality and interoperability test at the application level. WML, an XML application, serves as the markup language for WAP devices, just as HTML is the markup language for web pages. WMLscript and the associated WMLscript Libraries define a programming language, related to the ECMAscript language used for programs to run on web browsers. The Open Group will develop additional tests for the cache model, which defines how WAP compliant phones and gateways store information. The consortium will also develop tests for the use of WAP phones in multiple languages, ensuring the phones will be able to display numerous characters sets, including Japanese, as well as the ASCII character set. www.opengroup.org
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
Virage, Inc. and Informix Corporation announced a partnership agreement that enables Informix to integrate and distribute Virage products to broadcast and other media intensive markets worldwide. The Informix/Virage solution enables producers and other video content decision-makers to share video assets, resulting in decreased time to air, improved news and content quality, and streamlined production and workflow. Media360 provides a complete environment to collect, index, retrieve, distribute and archive video content and media assets. It is tightly integrated with object-relational technology, content creation tools, Web publishing, e-commerce, and analytic solutions. It enables new solutions for video production, stock footage archives, video collections, enterprise portals, and digital media distribution. The integration of Virage products into Media 360 allows Informix to provide its customers with the real time, comprehensive video indexing solution, making video easy to locate, browse, distribute, archive and repurpose. www.informix.com/.media, www.virage.com
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