eWEEK EDITORS

NAP of the Americas promises telecommunications carriers the fastest access to Latin America and the rest of the world. The giant switching station, launching this week in Miamis Overton neighborhood, is the first large Network Access Point (NAP) to open since the federal government mandated four as part of its exit from the Internet several […]

Because of an ambiguity in a 1998 copyright law, Internet service providers are at loggerheads with copyright owners over the extent to which they must police their subscribers peer-to-peer file-sharing activities. The conflict has intensified in the last few months, as entertainment companies have started using monitoring software that associates a users Internet Protocol (IP) […]

Compaq Computer Corp., irritated at the portrayal of IBM as a Linux champion, unveiled several programs aimed at enterprise users of the operating system. IBM has been vocal in its commitment to Linux since it announced last year that the open-source operating system will be integrated into all of its platforms. So Compaq, which sells […]

Financing Gels EchoStar Communications has reportedly turned to UBS Warburg and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. for $3 billion in short-term loans that the satellite broadcaster needs to make a bid for the parent of its chief competitor, DirecTV. EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen is expected to bid as much as $6 billion for Hughes […]

Infiniband, a new high-speed interconnect technology designed to boost bandwidth inside data centers, reached a significant milestone last week when supporters demonstrated it running enterprise-class database applications for the first time. But questions remain as to whether InfiniBand, set to debut this winter and backed by several high-tech heavyweights, offers significant advantages over established architectures […]

Storage companies, large and small, have new targets in their sights: small and midsize businesses. As evidence of that trend, about a half-dozen vendors, including Maxtor Corp. and SanDisk Corp., will be at PC Expo this week in New York to unveil a variety of storage hardware and software for such buyers. Hard drive maker […]

Advances in business intelligence software are helping retailers get to know their customers — and, more important, sell them more stuff — like never before. Yet those same retailers admit that mining customer data can sometimes result in errors that can frustrate or even bewilder their customers. Take the case of Steve Barrow, vice president […]

Freddie Mac and its larger cousin, Fannie Mae, are fierce competitors in the secondary mortgage market. But the two companies could make paperless real estate purchases a reality, thanks to their support for Web-based mortgage transactions. Both organizations have agreed to support eXtensible Markup Language (XML) standards established by the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization. […]

With all the hype that has surrounded Oracle Corp.s 9i database over the past few months, last weeks actual launch of the database upgrade threatened to be somewhat anticlimactic. But Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison came out aggressively during the event here, trumpeting the databases new features and a new pricing plan, all the […]

So much self-flagellation was going on at SuperComm this year, it wouldnt have surprised me a bit to learn that half the analysts and venture capitalists there had crawled to Atlanta on their knees seeking intercession and that the other half were wearing hair shirts. The dot-bomb confessional was open for business. “Blame me!” begged […]

With a two-year hiatus between versions and an eye toward competition from Java and Microsoft Corp.s Visual Basic, Sybase Inc. will ship a new version of its PowerBuilder fourth-generation language software development environment at the end of the month. Most enhancements in PowerBuilder 8.0 make it faster for users to build and deliver applications. The […]

SECURITY ABN Amro Holding N.V. last week unveiled a smart card based on the public-key infrastructure and designed to enable people to access multiple applications using Identrus LLCs secure banking standard. Known as ID-Key, the card was developed by the Amsterdam, Netherlands, banks Global Transaction Services unit and is one of the first applications of […]