Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 72 of 77)

The Digital Imaging Group (DIG), the digital imaging industry consortium, disclosed its plans to enable a variety of image workflows through its metadata initiative, DIG35. The goal of the Initiative is to simplify the process of collecting and managing information about an image and in the process enable a broad range of applications from image management to digital photo finishing. Such a standard will benefit the many different users of digital imaging, from personal imaging at the consumer level; commercial imaging for e-commerce of image-based content; and professional imaging for such industries as real estate, insurance, and scientific imaging. The DIG35 Initiative is supported by a broad cross-section of DIG members: Agfa, Canon Inc., Digital Intelligence Inc., Digitella Technology Inc., Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co., Eastman Kodak Co., Microsoft Corp., NETIMAGE, PhotoChannel Networks Inc., Polaroid and Seattle FilmWorks Inc.. XML will be a key technology in the implementation of the standard. XML’s powerful data representation capabilities and its wide spread adoption in the Internet will allow flexibility. For example, take the problem of describing the location a picture was taken. Depending on the application domain, location in a consumer photograph could be a place name or a GPS coordinate. For medical images, location would represent a part of the body; for astronomical images, location would carry yet a different meaning. The DIG chose XML not only for its widely adopted use, but also for the opportunity to unify its work with a concurrent effort happening in the ISO MPEG Committee (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11), the MPEG-7 Group. The DIG35 Initiative recently formalized an official liaison with the MPEG Committee to collaborate with MPEG-7’s effort in the area of still image metadata standardization. Through this partnership, the DIG will help define the metadata for still images within multimedia contents in order to help multimedia producers, owners and users manage their contents. www.digitalimaging.org

Adobe Systems Incorporated and Xerox Corporation announced a strategic initiative to integrate Adobe PDF technology with Xerox ContentGuard rights management solution. This alliance will enable publishers to implement secure e-commerce of PDF documents, while allowing end-users to access these documents in the native Acrobat Reader. Adobe and Xerox will also jointly support the definition and promotion of an open standard for rights specification design around the needs of the publishing industry. Initial availability of this integration will be this fall, and offered as a free upgrade to existing ContentGuard customers. www.adobe.com. www.contentguard.com.

Xerox Corporation announced availability of ContentGuard, a comprehensive new product suite designed to fuel document e-commerce for the publishing market. Combining Xerox

Open Market, Inc.announced that Renaissance Multimedia, an interactive agency based in New York City’s Silicon Alley, will be reselling LiveCommerce, using the product to develop industrial-strength catalogs for their customers. www.rcac.com, www.openmarket.com

Allaire Corporation introduced Allaire Spectra, a packaged system for content management, e-commerce and personalization that enables corporations to embrace the Web as a strategic center of their businesses. In beta testing today at over 170 sites, Allaire Spectra is designed to use best-practices established by successful Internet businesses, uniting content, commerce and customer interaction capabilities into a common model for enterprise-wide Web systems. Incorporating best practices in building and running large-scale Web businesses, Allaire Spectra is based on the concept of “transactive content” — systems that combine a tight relationship between the management of Web content assets, services that extend a company’s business models into e-commerce, and the ability to deliver this package to the customer in a rich, personalized manner. Allaire Spectra is designed around a model and methodology for building large scale content and commerce systems that embrace the idea that every participant in an enterprise has a unique set of requirements to be productive in their use of the Web. This spectrum of participants spans system administrators, developers, designers, business managers and users, as well as customers, partners, and site affiliates. With Allaire Spectra implemented across an enterprise, each member of the spectrum can use the Web in a logical way. For example, it gives business managers and users a rich set of Web-based tools for managing workflows and security roles, conducting analysis and reporting on the business, and self-managing content and commerce assets without any IT intervention. The six core services of Allaire Spectra include: Content Management, Workflow and Process Automation, Roles-based Security, Personalization, Business Intelligence, and Syndication. Allaire Spectra, which runs on Windows NT and Solaris, is currently in beta. The product is expected to ship in Q4 1999. A bundled offering that includes servers, tools, training, consulting and support will be priced at approximately $100,000. Standard pricing for Allaire Spectra will be $7,495 per server and requires ColdFusion Enterprise Application Server. www.allaire.com

XMLSolutions Corporation (XMLS) announced today that they have signed Lisle Technology Partners (LTP) as a strategic development partner. As a strategic partner, LTP will be involved in assisting XMLSolutions in technical product direction, as well as a resource partner for implementing the product strategy. The first project LTP will work on for XMLSolutions is the Exeter family of XML-based e-commerce products, a suite of products specifically designed to fulfill the objective of business-to-business e-commerce. The Exeter product set includes the Exeter XML Server, Exeter E-commerce Engine and Exeter EDI Parser. This application suite eliminates the manual processes of trade by enabling computer applications and humans to exchange business documents written in XML. www.xmls.com, www.lisletech.com

webMethods, Inc., and MRO.com, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of PSDI, announced the companies have entered a strategic partnership to deliver a series of XML-based e-Commerce solutions to PSDI customers. Under the agreement, PSDI will incorporate webMethods’ XML technology into MRO.com, PSDI’s business-to-business e-Commerce network that connects buyers and suppliers over the Internet. MRO.com is an online marketplace that supports the procurement, management, control and purchase of all MRO goods and services. Using webMethods B2B, MRO.com will provide buyers with direct access to Web-hosted and XML-based catalogs and real-time connections to the back-end systems of their suppliers, further reducing the typically high costs associated with traditional, paper-based MRO processes. In addition, PSDI plans to extend its XML-enabled set of Java-based business application interfaces to further enhance MAXIMO, its industry leading EAM system, for business-to-business integration with enterprise systems. This will allow integration with applications and systems from a wide array of vendors inside or outside the firewall. www.webmethods.com, www.psdi.com

Linguistic Technology Corporation (LTC) unveiled EasyAsk eCom 1.0, a new natural language question/answer search technology for e-commerce. EasyAsk eCom allows retail consumers, business-to-business buyers and merchants to interact with e-commerce product catalogs and purchase history using plain English. EasyAsk eCom features an extensive vocabulary (dictionary) that is automatically extended upon installation by interrogating the underlying e-commerce database. The dictionary, which can be enhanced dynamically, contains product attributes found in the database and: synonyms, structured hierarchies, and business logic. An Agent feature can monitor the e-commerce database and notify managers of the occurrence of key events. EasyAsk eCom is available immediately. Pricing includes an initial license fee of $5,000 plus a monthly usage and support fee of