Jim Wagner

Last week, AT&T officials said they expected the spin off of its cable unit by Friday, though they made no promises; this week, the company has some housecleaning to attend to before the second- and third-largest cable operators in the country officially merge. The merger still awaits approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and […]

Verizon , the local telephone company created in the wake of the court-ordered break up of the AT&T monopoly in the 80s, has returned to the national scene with the announcement Monday of “Enterprise Advanced.” Building on the carrier’s asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network, company officials will open up the I-95 corridor from Boston to […]

While Philips Electronics, the Dutch consumer electronics giant, may have sold off its speech processing technology division, it’s not going very far from the coop; the company that bought the division Oct. 7 announced Friday it would join the standards body co-founded by Philips. ScanSoft bought up the technology created by Philips for 36 million […]

While still focusing on its latest iteration for Windows, Opera developers expanded their presence in the Unix world with two new releases for FreeBSD and Linux. With Opera 6.1 available for FreeBSD users, the popular alternative to Windows Internet Explorer is compatible with eight separate operating systems. They are: Windows, Linux, Mac, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBSD, […]

A judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago approved the buyout of Bluelight.com assets to United Online Wednesday evening for $8.4 million. Officials at Bluelight.com, the Internet service provider (ISP) arm of bankrupt retail giant KMart , were pleased at the ruling and the resolution of several filings from organizations opposed to the sale. […]

The board of directors at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) certainly created a contentious air at its semi-annual meeting, deciding to phase out five of its publicly-elected director spots Wednesday. But more importantly, the words of the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) operators and regional Internet registries (RIRs) should have ICANN […]

Aiming to marry content and content delivery, Vignette Tuesday moved to pick up Epicentric for $32 million. Vignette, which unveiled its V7 package of Web services applications focused on content management and workflow process last week, now has a portal and content delivery division to put real-time software applications on the enterprise workstation. Officials expect […]

KMart’s bankruptcy bid to sell off its Internet service provider arm has run afoul of some of the companies who helped Bluelight.com get off the ground. The retail giant announced Oct. 11 it would sell Bluelight.com to national ISP United Online for $8.4 million, while keeping a commissions-based service open to continue the Bluelight.com offering. […]

Nortel Networks unleashed its voice and IP convergence strategy Tuesday, aimed at getting enterprise customers to shed disparate communications equipment and rolling them into one product. The Canadian manufacturer’s motto for the marketing push, dubbed “One Network. A World of Choice,” embraces that convergence concept. Instead of three or four separate pieces of equipment handling […]

An international fraud task force, charged with closing down Internet scams, won another victory Monday with Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioners levying a $229,000 fine against a notorious scam that claimed to treat terminally-ill cancer patients. Earlier this year, Netforce — a U.S./Canadian group created to shut down e-mail and Web site fraud — filed […]

Dell launched its answer to the workstation PC of the future with the OptiPlex SX260, a book-sized machine that sacrifices some of the flexibility of standalone machines for more room at the cubicle. Weighing in at eight pounds, the SX260 is Dell’s answer to the slew of mini-PCs hitting the market today. Aimed at the […]

Broadband’s big, overseas anyways, just ask Parisian Internet equipment manufacturer Alcatel officials announced Monday they had signed a contract extension with an Australian telecommunications carrier after netting big contracts with Chinese carriers last week. Telstra, the incumbent telephone company in Australia, is expanding on its existing three-year contract with Alcatel to supply the new Alcatel […]