Christopher Saunders

Among the surprises in the news from Microsoft and AOL Time Warner that they had settled a private antitrust lawsuit regarding AOL’s Netscape unit was a pledge that the two would “explore” ways to achieve interoperability of their Instant Messaging platforms. As part of Microsoft’s plan to pay AOL Time Warner $750 million to settle […]

After years of shying away from compatibility with other instant messaging networks, AOL Time Warner is again indicating that it will consider ways to open its proprietary system. The partner in this effort is longtime IM archrival Microsoft , and the announcement comes as part of a $750 million settlement between the two Internet giants […]

Microsoft’s MSN unit is expanding the reach of its MSN Messenger instant messaging client, through an expanded deal with European wireless carrier Orange SA. The agreement will see Paris-based Orange making MSN Messenger available via a Short Messaging Service interface to its 35 million subscribers across the continent. Users in the U.K., the Netherlands, and […]

We’ve been writing frequently about the growing interest in IM bots, or interactive agents. In a corporate environment, an IM bot can interface with a backend database to provide information in response to a natural-language or text-based menu query — perfect for memory-limited mobile devices or for simplifying routine tasks, like corporate directory lookups. On […]

Instant messaging owes much of its near-ubiquity to its teenaged early adopters. Now, it looks as if the giants in the IM field might again be turning to youth-focused segments to promote their networks. But this time, the stakes could be greater, since home video games are no longer merely the reserve of kids — […]

Video messaging player Avistar Communications is taking steps to bring its presence-based intra-enterprise messaging system outside company borders — making the solution more appealing, but also raising the specter of greater competition. The ten-year-old, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based firm’s new Community Exchange and AvistarVOS Proxy offerings are jointly aimed at making it easier for businesses to […]

While the PC-based instant messaging world seems unlikely to shake the limitations of proprietary systems and differing, incompatible protocols anytime soon, the same can’t be said for the wireless industry. Instead, there’s a good chance that the foundations for presence-enabled messaging and other applications could be coming to mobile phones within the year — and […]

Increasingly, instant messaging today is becoming the story of how Microsoft , IBM’s Lotus, Sun Microsystems , Oracle , and other big-name enterprise software vendors are pushing to merge IM and presence with business apps and groupware. The vision, as these players see it, is that instant messaging becomes entwined with other applications used frequently […]

In response to the heightened level of national security and efforts to prepare for terrorist threats and other emergencies, a number of U.S. government agencies are leading the charge in rolling out real-time alerting systems. Elements of the military, such as the Pentagon, have had alerting systems for some time that would send voice messages […]

The company has kept a low profile to date, but Global Technology Ventures is unlikely to remain under the radar for much longer, sporting as it does a robust enterprise instant messaging and presence system and a number of high-profile deployments. When last we heard from the then year-old New York-based startup in 2001, executives […]