eWEEK EDITORS

In an effort to easily voice-enable existing Web services, six companies announced Monday that they had formed the Speech Application Language Tags Forum. Cisco Systems, Comverse, Intel, Microsoft, Philips Electronics and SpeechWorks International are working together to build a royalty-free, platform-independent standard with which developers can extend applications written in HTML, xHTML and XML to […]

Taking the slow-but-safe route to the enhanced services hamlet, Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp. this week debuted new offerings in online storage, voice dialing and ultra-broadband Internet access. Specifically, BellSouth will offer its Managed Storage Services live later this year, with partner StorageNetworks Inc., of Waltham, Mass. It will be marketed initially as a way to conduct […]

Cingular Wireless has all but announced plans to switch its Time Division Multiple Access network to the global system for mobile communications standard. Since AT&T Wireless, the only other major Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) network operator, announced its intention to convert to global system for mobile communications (GSM), industry observers have been grilling Cingular […]

A few days after Sept. 11, Ed Zander was sitting in a conference room at Sun Microsystems stately Santa Clara, Calif., campus trying to make sense of things. Not just the terrorist attacks that had destroyed Suns offices in the World Trade Center, caused the death of a prominent Sun executive and made employees fearful […]

As the ASP market has matured, more-established IT companies have entered the arena. Now, many of the markets early adopters, facing the threat of bankruptcy, are piggybacking on the more-stable companies. Sun Microsystems Inc. is doing its part to encourage the trend. The Palo Alto, Calif., company last week launched Destination ASP, a co-sales and […]

Cruising somewhere along U.S. Interstate 80 right now is a truck driver with about $500 worth of high-end tea in his cab. Truck drivers may not be the first demographic youd think of when deciding whom to target as a fastidious tea drinker, but the ability to make such seemingly unlikely connections is driving interest […]

Microsoft Corp. is developing new middleware that will allow developers to program Web services to run across globally distributed networks. The middleware, code-named Indigo, will extend the security and authentication that is provided via Microsofts Passport in the current .Net architecture. To do it, Indigo will rely on the updated, Kerberos-based version of Passport, which […]

Networking ventures using satellites as their main platform for delivering content are foundering, suggesting the companies need to find terrestrial partners, or go down in flames. Cidera, the pioneer of satellite-based distribution of cached content, laid off 75 people in its latest round of firings, and will run out of investor cash in mid-2002. Executives […]

Isnt there somebody out there with several million bucks who can buy Metricom? Metricom shut down its Ricochet wireless data network, filed for bankruptcy protection and cant seem to find a buyer. Yet the city of New York called Metricom to ask if the network could be turned back on so that rescue workers at […]

Bought too much bandwidth? Youre not alone. Evidence is trickling in that the bandwidth boom — the expected explosion of consumer and business use of data networking — just hasnt happened. Although more people are going online every day and more companies are using data networking for more applications, the total of these activities may […]