Michael Hickins

Even Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield isn’t sure how seriously he’s taking the fact that his company’s next press conference will be a virtual event on World of Warcraft (WoW). Partly, he’s doing it to parody the suddenly trendy idea of companies hosting business events within the confines of such virtual worlds as WoW and Second […]

Enterprise mobility applications vendor Sybase has acquired intellectual property from privately held iFoundry, an engineering company focused on designing, developing and building wireless applications, for an undisclosed amount of cash. Sybase acquired licensing rights for short-range wireless interconnect protocol stacks, as well as a software consulting, training and professional engineering services business, in order to […]

IBM (Quote) is rolling out identity management software to help small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) transact with the networks of larger partners. Federated Identity Manager Business Gateway allows employees of one company to log on to the network of an outside company without having to provide a user ID and password to the other network. […]

Telephony and communications software vendor Avaya (Quote) said it has agreed to acquire Traverse, a privately-held maker of enterprise mobility applications, for $15 million in cash. The acquisition will give Avaya a differentiating feature in the increasingly crowded unified communications (UC) market by allowing corporate workers to run the same applications they use on their desktops […]

With Microsoft (Quote) building hype as it hurtles toward its much-ballyhooed Vista launch, the software vendor today released Office Live, one of the key applications expected to leverage the advanced features in the forthcoming Windows operating system. Office Live, which offers a variety of hosted applications aimed principally at small- and medium-sized businesses, comes in three […]

NetManage (Quote) has unveiled an application that helps companies measure and allocate resources as they introduce SOA (define) into their IT environments. SOA allows enterprises to extend legacy applications rather than having to replace them with more modern software, but it also tends to be more inefficient from a resource perspective, requiring more bandwidth and CPU […]

This is not for the change-averse or faint of heart. Former PeopleSoft co-founder and CEO Dave Duffield this week opened Workday, a company offering Web-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) (define) software for mid-sized companies. The software, which features a browser-based interface and a Web services-based approach to interoperability, is intended to mirror actual workflows and help […]

Microsoft Office 2007 has gone golden. The Redmond, Wash.-based software vendor (Quote) released its latest version of the world-beating desktop productivity suite to manufacturing Monday. “We’ve crossed the development finish line,” noted Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division in a statement. Raikes added that the new release includes the most significant improvements to the […]

On-demand collaboration solutions vendor BlueTie came up with a new way to pay the bills. The company decided to stop charging customers for e-mail and calendar applications. It’s not using advertising as a revenue model, either. Instead, BlueTie is betting that customers will make enough use of the features provided by partners to make the […]

Network neutrality has made a hash of traditional political alliances over the fundamental issue of whether the Internet should be regulated or whether tolls for faster lanes makes sense. It may even force politicians to think for themselves for a change. After all, no matter how they vote, they’re going to disappoint some very powerful […]