eWEEK EDITORS

Telecom equipment giant Alcatel is expected to announce plans to deploy Voice-over-Digital Subscriber Lines this week, likely giving the technology a jump-start. DSL is used to provide high-speed data access over copper telephone wires. With VoDSL, service providers can offer eight to 12 voice channels along with data over an individual telephone line. That makes […]

Iona Technologies Wanted a gigabit LAN that would allow it to easily relocate systems and add users without having to continually rerun cable. So Cisco reseller Dimension Data turned Ionas cubicle walls into wiring closets, linking 12-person workgroups with optical cabling that runs down the “spine” of a cubicle cluster. Iona says its saving 25 […]

We told you a while back that a tsunami was headed our way. Well, its here. Many vendors and analysts predict that converged data and PBX systems will take over the small to midsize business (SMB) market in just a few years. Integrators that dont have both oars—IP and voice expertise—in the water will be […]

F5 Networks Inc.s Big-IP HA controller load balancer makes Web farms of heterogeneous commodity servers a viable alternative to expensive big-iron servers and hard-to-manage clusters. However, budget-minded companies must figure in a trade-off: the manageability issues that can crop up on any server farm. The Big-IP HA Controller, which shipped last month, proved powerful, flexible […]

After five weeks of buying shares at bargain-basement prices, market bulls and value investors took a breather last week, pushing our index down 9 percent—its first weekly decline this year. Especially hard hit were Internet consulting companies. Businesses continue to reconsider their IT budgets amid the weak economy. “At the end of November, there were […]

The vendors we spoke with each think that their solution is the best way to ride the wave of convergence. Here are some of the arguments that floated past us: The Integrated Communications Platform (ICP) vendors are delivering a complete office solution. Even Vertical Networks product is called InstantOffice. Their goal is to provide everything […]

Compromise is in the air on Capitol Hill, and the end of duty-free online shopping could be near. The debate about whether to let states tax electronic commerce has grown more intense in the past six months. Potent pro-tax lobbying forces like the National Retail Federation have waded into the fray, and state and local […]

Trademark disputes sank to an all-time low this month when The Pillsbury Company fired off cease-and-desist letters to the likes of Columbia University and Sun Microsystems. Seems Pillsbury has owned a trademark on the phrase “bake-off” since 1949, and it doesnt want anyone using the term to describe events at which software engineers test their […]

EToys and its subsidiaries, BabyCenter.Com and ParentCenter.com, could be forced into bankruptcy after an agreement with creditors expires this week. The Santa Monica, Calif., toy sellers unsecured creditors have agreed not to take action to collect on their debts, and eToys has agreed not to pay any past-due debts and to operate under a budget […]

Fred Buehlers web strategy has a familiar ring to it: invest in promising startups, beef up the storefront and roll out new technology. What makes it remarkable is the timing. Even in the midst of a jittery economy and a parade of dot-com disasters like Go.com, the vice president of e-business for Eastman Chemical Co. […]

David Von Ancken is very, very pleased. “I could jump up and down all day telling you how happy I am,” he says. Von Ancken is the winner of an online film contest sponsored by Universal Pictures and Hypnotic.com, an Internet company that develops the work of “emerging” artists. Since winning the contest in January, […]

Its almost a perfect storm.” Thats how William Smith, manager of market-driven load management at Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a nonprofit energy research group in Palo Alto, Calif., describes Californias energy crisis. Thanks to a confluence of misguided decisions—many of them related to deregulation—that triggered the Golden States current crisis, that analogy is apt. […]