Colin C. Haley

Like a kick returner outrunning his blockers, the advance of corporate Internet Protocol telephony is getting ahead of its security measures — but could be heading for a paralyzing hit, according to new research report. Current IP telephony offerings show an “alarming lack” of safeguards, exposing companies to privacy invasions, data theft and malicious attacks, […]

An existing Voice over Internet Protocol advocacy group Monday announced several powerful new members to help educate consumers and sway regulators. In a conference call with reporters, Microsoft and Intel-sponsored Voice Over Net (VON) said AT&T and Texas Instruments have joined its ranks. The addition to the Washington-based coalition comes as policy-makers debate whether rules […]

Looking to appeal to enterprise customers, telecom equipment maker Lucent has signed a wide-ranging partnership with Enterasys to bolster its network security capabilities. Since spinning off Avaya in 2000, Lucent’s focus has been squarely on voice and data carriers. But the plague of viruses has convinced the Murray Hill, N.J., company to reconsider large corporate […]

In 1990, Patrick Spain co-founded Hoover’s Inc., taking the reins as its CEO. The company, then known as the Reference Press, started out a money-losing publisher of business information books. Then Spain, who considered himself a technophobe since he flunked long division as a fourth-grader, discovered the Internet and immediately began to move the company’s […]

In 2000, NTT DoCoMo paid $6 billion for a 16 percent stake in AT&T Wireless . As a condition of the Japanese telecom’s investment, AT&T wireless agreed to launch third-generation mobile services in 13 of the top 50 U.S. markets by June of 2004. DoCoMo hoped to win new users for its i-mode mobile phone […]

UPDATE: Days of back-and-forth bidding ended after 2 o’clock this morning when Cingular submitted a $41 billion offer to acquire AT&T Wireless , trumping Vodafone in the auction for the nation’s third-largest mobile carrier. The deal would vault Cingular from its perch as the second-largest wireless provider in the United States to the largest with […]

Coming off a week when IT security pros were on high alert, IBM and Cisco today unveiled joint offerings to gird enterprise networks against viruses, worms and hackers. The Armonk, N.Y., and San Jose, Calif., IT giants aim to help customers build “self-defending” systems that cover critical points of business computing — from laptops to […]

The word IPO seems to be coming back into conversations around the high-tech water cooler especially in the chipmaking sector. Case in point: Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) on Wednesday filed paperwork for a $714 million IPO, the latest news out of the resurgent chip industry. The Chinese company counts Motorola among its investors. The Chicago-area […]

If Comcast’s $66 billion hostile takeover of Walt Disney Co. is approved, the company plans to leverage its position as a broadband Internet service provider in order to make the most of the deal. Ever-growing broadband demand “proves that consumers want to control what content they get and when they get it,” Comcast CEO Brian […]

SBC has awarded a five-year contract to Siemens to provide the platform for the San Antonio telecom’s hosted Internet Protocol services. Launched in November, SBC’s PremierSERV portfolio provides Voice over IP (VoIP), virtual private networks and other offerings to large corporate customers in 30 U.S. cities. “To get to market fast, we went with a […]

Calling broadband telephony a “natural extension” of its infrastructure, Covad Communications will introduce Voice over Internet protocol service in four markets in October as the first step in a national rollout. Initially, three products will be sold for businesses: basic voice; small office/home office voice; and virtual PBX . All include unlimited local calling, with […]

Opera and Motorola are readying joint products for mobile phone browsers that accommodate both HTML browser and Wireless Applications Protocol software. The companies started working together about four months ago to fashion an offering that would appeal to mobile carriers that want to add revenue-generating HTML-based functionality without overhauling their existing WAP infrastructure. The joint […]