Compiled by Kevin Smith
European Cellular Giants Enter Partnership
Deutsche Telekom and British Telecommunications PLC have agreed to cooperate on building next-generation mobile phone networks in Germany and Britain, BT's German subsidiary said Tuesday. Under the preliminary agreement, the two telecom giants will share base stations, masts and antennae in an attempt to trim the cost of rolling out the service by 20-30 percent, Viag Interkom said. In Germany, the sharing will take place between Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division and Viag Interkom. Deutsche Telekom's One2One unit will cooperate with BT Wireless in Britain. The announcement comes one week after German regulators said they would allow greater cooperation in building expensive next-generation networks. British authorities already had ruled in favor of such sharing.
Alta Vista Rolls Out New Business Software
A new line of business software introduced Tuesday by AltaVista Co. will let workers scour corporate networks, e-mail accounts and personal computers by stitching together valuable--and sometimes embarrassing--information scattered on far-flung office systems. AltaVista hails the new product as a desirable tool for increasing productivity. A prominent computer privacy expert said it could backfire, hurting employee morale by making it easier to fish out personal e-mails and other sensitive data stored on hard drives. The software also could raise legal issues and create new security headaches. AltaVista says businesses will be able to tailor the software so certain areas of an office's computing systems remain off-limits. The number of employees able to search the master index also can be restricted. The software will use the same patented technology that has made AltaVista's website one of the world's most popular online search engines.
Intel Creates Fastest Silicon Transistors
Intel Corp. has created what it calls the world's fastest silicon transistors--tiny switches that turn on and off nearly 1,000 times more quickly than those that power today's microprocessors. The technology also shrinks the devices to a width of about 80 atoms, Intel's director of components research, Gerald Marcyk, said. That would make room for about 25 times more transistors than are packed in today's top-of-the-line Pentium 4. The transistors would not be incorporated into processors until 2007, Marcyk said. Such powerful processors are expected to play a key role in the growth of speech recognition and language translation applications, as well as programs that now require a supercomputer to run.
Transistors are at the heart of all modern computers. The opening and closing of their switches are the basis of all computations inside microprocessors.
CallWave Increases Phone Line Installation
CallWave announced that its virtual phone lines are now installed in over 6 million U.S. homes and small offices--15 percent of the Internet-enabled market--more than doubling its installed base of software phone lines in the last nine months. CallWave's phone line services, which deliver calls using the Internet as a virtual "last mile," sparked a viral consumer adoption that--combined with the company's superior track record of customer satisfaction--has enabled CallWave to become the fastest growing local exchange carrier ever. CallWave's software-based switching technology is now routing in excess of 3 million calls a day and approaching 1 billion calls in total. Software phone lines are typically used to receive calls that would otherwise be missed because the user is not at home or his regular phone line is busy. By installing a software phone line, CallWave customers generally save $20 or more per month on regular telephone lines and receive their important calls when and where they want them.
Messagizer Launches in UK
The Buongiorno Group, an Italian provider of e-mail and SMS marketing services, has launched in the United Kingdom as Messagizer, offering content creation and delivery of email ads for portals and community sites. SMS services are planned to follow in July. The Messagizer service has two parts: creative services to generate advertising and promotional content and delivery services that include fully managed hosting at Buongiorno data centers in Parma and Milan. The company has developed its own open standards-based push technology reputedly capable of delivering up to 250 million e-mails per month
across Europe. Messagizer customers can launch, track and generate reports of their e-mail and SMS campaigns using a browser-based toolset. According to Messagizer CEO Paul Shalet, HTML e-mails enable customers to slice and dice user-responses down to the level of single clicks in real time. Buongiorno also has offices in France, Germany, Spain, Austria and Portugal.
Lottery Games Coming to Wireless Mobile Units
In-Fusio, Oberthur Gaming Technologies and Oberthur Card Systems are pleased to announce a newly formed consortium, established to provide a technologically secure solution for the provision of real-time lottery games, utilizing wireless mobile handsets. For the first time, mobile users will be able to securely access lotteries, thus enabling them to purchase lottery games from their mobile handsets. Lotteries will now have the ability to utilize state-of-the-art technology, while insuring the future growth of their businesses. These features, combined with the added convenience to players, will enable the lottery sector to remain competitive in the years to come. In-Fusio, recognized as the pioneer in "Connected Mobile Games" and the first company to launch connected games on GSM mobile phones, brings an unrivalled expertise in mobile gaming to the collaboration. By embarking on this new market and showing its ambition in m-gaming, In-Fusio also diversifies its own portfolio, which already includes over 20 games.
Roamable Rolls Out New Wireless Technology
At the Mobile Outlook conference, Roamable Corp. announced the launch of an easily implemented, powerful, patents-pending wireless platform that works over standard e-mail protocols. A breakthrough in mobile computing, Roamable's new wireless technology enables mobile users to perform sophisticated, personalized, interactive queries and transactions on demand directly from virtually all mobile devices
and with no new software, syncing or downloads. Roamable's software is designed to be non-intrusive to implement and requires no new firewall gateways, data reformatting or significant use of technical resources. It works with all current e-mail clients and fully uses a company's existing digital infrastructure, enabling any company to operate interactive wireless services without investing heavily in new technology. For enterprises that have secured corporate e-mail, Roamable can quickly and easily offer secure access
to corporate data and intranet resources over the already secured channel. (Roamable will announce initial enterprise customers over the summer.) For customer-facing services, Roamable facilitates high levels of customer relationship management (CRM), better opportunities for monetization and virtually universal access.
Doctrieve Spending Capital on Storage Vaults
Privately held Brisbane company Doctrieve will spend AU$10 million (US$5.06 million) setting up "remote information storage vaults" in San Francisco, Toronto, Frankfurt and Hong Kong. The "vaults" will store more than 200 terabytes of data by the end of this year, according to Managing Director Earl Woolley. The company already has a main vault in Brisbane. It claims to provide storage facilities for customers including the Queensland Education Department, Schweppes-Cottees, Sydney's Star City casino, Gillette, Leighton, the New South Wales Parliament and the Australian Defence Department. The company has appointed ACA Pacific as the key distributor for the Australian market.
Hypercom/UniCache Partner in Deal
Hypercom Corporation and UniCache.com, Inc., a leading provider of alternative payment technologies, today announced an alliance that seeks to enable consumers to conduct fast, convenient and anonymous electronic payments with Internet retailers, as well as brick-and-mortar merchants using Hypercom's epic ICE card payment terminals. With UniCache's encrypted, real-time escrow-like payment system, online shoppers will be able to quickly secure a UniCache account through a hyperlink that will appear on many of their favorite Internet sites. Initially funded by either a credit card or electronic check, the account can then be used to purchase products, content or digital downloads on any website that supports UniCache payments. Consumers can completely manage their accounts online; they can check balances, view transaction history, add funds as desired and even track delivery of shipped products. In addition, consumers can receive a pre-funded UniCache stored value "UniCard" for use at any "brick & mortar" merchant equipped with Hypercom's ICE touch screen-based card payment terminals, or any Internet site using the UniCache system. The UniCard can also be used at any ATM machine using the STAR, PLUS or INTERLINK network. The only identification needed when using a UniCache online account or UniCard is a 16-digit account number.