Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 76 of 79)

Bluestone Software, Inc., announced the giveaway of 3,000 copies of Bluestone Visual-XML, a toolkit for building XML applications. Available today, Bluestone Visual-XML is a pure Java development tool that makes use of a straightforward graphical user interface, drag-and-drop capabilities, and Mentor, Bluestone’s advanced interactive navigation and help facility to simplify development of dynamic XML applications. Bluestone Visual-XML’s Database Publishing Wizard helps users generate XML documents from data stored in a database, without any coding. The Process Wizard allows for the input of XML documents into a dynamic XML server. An example application is included with Visual-XML, showing the use of several Open Application Group (OAG) Document Type Definition’s (DTDs) for processing purchase orders against a database, including logging of transactions. This sample application can be a useful template for creating applications with any of the emerging industry DTD’s and DTD repositories, such as OBI, cXML, RosettaNet, OASIS, and BizTalk. Pricing for Bluestone Visual-XML is $99 and may be purchased and downloaded online at the Intraware intraware.shop Website ( www.intraware.com/shop) and at the Bluestone Website. www.bluestone.com

Akamai Technologies announced the commercial availability of its first offering, FreeFlow. FreeFlow has been in commercial use since the beginning of April and to date has delivered more than 10 billion hits for some of the biggest sites on the Web. The service dramatically improves Web site performance and reliability, and is backed by Akamai’s Proof of Performance guarantee. In a separate announcement today, the company named Yahoo! as one of its charter FreeFlow customers. FreeFlow was designed around the needs of high-volume Web sites in eCommerce, new media, and Global 2,000 businesses. To help the customer assess FreeFlow’s performance during the evaluation period, Akamai contracts with Keynote Systems, a third-party measurement service. Based on the testing done by this independent authority, the customer is able to evaluate the speed and reliability improvements of FreeFlow. The results show exactly how FreeFlow performed using live traffic, and are compared with the customer’s existing processes. FreeFlow customers pay only for the network resources they use — no capital investment is required. Usage charges are priced according to megabits per second of content served. Customers commit to a minimum usage level and may “burst” above this commitment. Monthly pricing begins at $2,000 per megabit per second, with discounts for volume usage. www.akamai.com

Intershop announced its partnership in the SAP mySAP.com business-to-business e-commerce portal. Other partners in mySAP.com announced by SAP are IBM, Pandesic, and Microsoft. Hosting directories, information services and industry-specific content and services, mySAP.com is the Internet business strategy that creates collaborative markets and facilitates dynamic business relationships through industry business yellow pages, online catalogs and e-commerce for more than 10 million users and many partner organizations. Intershop software adds fully automated business-to-business procurement to mySAP.com by connecting purchase managers who use SAP software with suppliers, who offer products and services on the Internet. Sellers are not required to use SAP R/3 standard software. Intershop e-commerce applications integrate with most legacy and ERP systems such as SAP R/3, Oracle Applications, Sage KHK, Baan, JD Edwards and Peoplesoft. Intershop embraces the new XML data exchange format that is expected to replace the old EDI standard. Using XML technology, Intershop’s back-office will connect to the SAP material management application, allowing order information to pass directly from the system of the buyer to the seller. www.intershop.com

Microsoft Corp. and Ariba Inc., announced plans to work together to accelerate the adoption of XML-based standards for e-commerce. The companies will join together to integrate Commerce XML (cXML), an emerging standard for business-to-business e-commerce, with the Microsoft BizTalk framework to define schema for communicating operating resource transactions, such as catalogs and orders. In addition to collaborating on BizTalk and cXML, Ariba and Microsoft plan to work together to implement these e-commerce frameworks into products offered by both companies. Ariba will support the BizTalk framework in Ariba e-commerce solutions, and Microsoft will integrate support for cXML into upcoming releases of the Microsoft Commerce Server and BizTalk Server. This collaboration will enable integration between Ariba e-commerce solutions and the multitude of supplier Web sites based on the Microsoft commerce platform. The joint work will provide the opportunity for Microsoft and Ariba customers to more easily and efficiently conduct business-to-business e-commerce with business partners worldwide. As a member of the core group of organizations that will drive the development of BizTalk, Ariba plans to collaborate with Microsoft on the continued development of operating resource transaction cXML schema. Under the planned development, Ariba will use XML-Data Reduced (XDR), the preferred syntax for BizTalk, in the next version of cXML. www.microsoft.com, www.ariba.com

RSDi.com, a new silicon valley startup, has launched the Internet’s first Open Source E-Commerce project. The first product, the Online E-Commerce Server utilizes Sun Microsystems’ (java.sun.com) Java and Jini for a full out of the box E-Commerce solution. The product includes integration with Cybercash and PaymentNet for credit card processing, shopping carts, rewards programs, coupons, online auctions, automatic XML catalog publishing, business to business XML transactions, a GUI Java applet for building stores and auctions over the Internet, and runs on the Java Servlet, WebLogic, NetDynamics 5, and Netscape Application Server platforms. The success of projects like Linux and Apache have shown open source code software developed over the Internet is highly successful. RSDi.com is applying the same principles and methods to the ever-booming E-Commerce industry. Most E-Commerce software is extremely proprietary and expensive giving RSDi’s software a unique position in the Internet commerce marketplace. RSDi.com sells full technical support and consulting for the Online E-Commerce Server www.rsdi.com

Softshare has unveiled Softshare Delta, a data mapping and translation application that meets the challenges of integrating EDI documents and XML documents with an enterprise’s existing line of business applications. Softshare Delta supports the broad range of data formats that today’s business must work with. These data formats include the ANSI X12 and UN/EDIFACT EDI standards, flat files, databases, XML documents, and text documents. Softshare Delta is one of only a handful of EDI data mapping applications that supports Microsoft’s OLE DB standard and the XML data format. When mapping from one data format to another, Softshare Delta provides the user with a three-pane view: the top half of the view displays mapping rules and the bottom half is split between the source and target data formats. Users may customize the interface by viewing only one or two panes. Mapping a data element from the source data format to the target data format is as simple as dragging and dropping that element. Softshare Delta’s Expression Builder allows users to incorporate functions, conditions, variables, and constants into the mapping rules. Available for $3,600-$5,800, Softshare Delta works with Softshare Vista 2.0 or Softshare’s Electronic Commerce Server (ECS) application for data communications, tracking, and map execution management. Both Softshare Vista and Softshare ECS provide secure communications between trading partners and Softshare’s network using Internet standards such as TCP/IP, SMTP, POP3 and the S/MIME security standard. www.softshare.com/software/delta.

Optika Inc. announced that it will integrate Optika eMedia with the Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP) and next-generation Microsoft technologies, including BizTalk Server, to offer a complete Web commerce solution. BizTalk Server will extend Microsoft CIP features found in Site Server Commerce Edition version 3.0 to further enhance interchange and data transformation capabilities, as well as trading partner management tools. The integration with Microsoft’s commerce technology offers a platform that will enable corporations to more rapidly and easily exchange business information with their partners over the Web, and will extend Optika eMedia’s functionality in providing access to disparate types of transaction information. Together with its existing Web commerce relationships with EDI vendor Harbinger and XML Internet forms vendor UWI.Com, Optika’s alliance with Microsoft enables Optika’s customers to use industry-standard eCommerce technologies to more effectively and efficiently exchange business transactions. www.optika.com

UWI.Com, and Commerce One, announced a partnership that will integrate Commerce One’s MarketSite and UWI.Com’s InternetForms System, to streamline the supply chain and bring, XML-based e-commerce to all sizes of trading organizations. The integration allows a trading community’s suppliers to interact with MarketSite using InternetForms, which provides simplified supplier integration into the MarketSite marketplace. Typically, suppliers are small and medium-sized organizations (SMEs) who still use costly channels such as paper, email, and fax to perform transactions with a MarketSite trading community. For example, historically a supplier has used email or fax to exchange catalog content updates, status updates, invoices, and purchase orders with its trading community, which were then manually entered into MarketSite. Soon, suppliers will be able to connect to a MarketSite trading community with a web browser, open an InternetForm (for example, a catalog content update), fill it out, sign it and submit it, facilitating e-commerce trading with the community and removing manual entry from the process. www.uwi.com, www.commerceone.com