Michael Hickins

A federal agency is set to recommend significant changes to specifications for electronic-voting machines next week, internetnews.com has learned. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is recommending that the 2007 version of the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) decertify direct record electronic (DRE) machines. DREs are currently used by more than 30 percent […]

Microsoft  has capped off its upgrade of Project 2007 with a comprehensive IT governance tool called Portfolio. Portfolio is essentially Project for Project; it allows executives to prioritize myriad projects in an enterprise development cue through the use of a matrix that takes into account such factors as whether a project is mission critical or […]

IBM  said it will acquire privately held wireless network performance monitoring company Vallent, pending regulatory approvals. IBM would not disclose financial details of the deal. Vallent’s software is used to report problems such as dropped calls and traffic bottlenecks, and it helps operators improve service quality, prioritize the correction of outages and identify potential network […]

A Ventana Research study of 488 companies indicates that a majority of companies plan to implement some type of BI service in the next 12 months. But a preponderance of those respondents believe they lack expertise in SOA to make those plans a reality. While 81 percent of respondents said that SOA is important “to […]

Salesforce.com is introducing a suite of integration applications. In doing so, it hopes to remove a major obstacle in its pursuit of enterprise dollars: integration with installed systems. ApexConnect is a family of integration services that will allow enterprises to integrate their complex on-premise systems with on-demand point applications offered by Salesforce.com. A key feature […]

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 […]

Trimble , a vendor of Global Positioning System (GPS) applications for mobile handsets, is picking up the pace with GPS-enabled devices with its purchase of privately-held Spacient Technologies for an undisclosed amount of cash. Spacient makes enterprise field service management and mobile mapping software for municipalities and utilities. The buy gives Trimble a platform for […]

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  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  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 […]

Google  wants to push more content and more ads onto mobile devices in more regions of the world. That was the message from John Hanke, director of product management for Google, during a question and answer session at the ThinkEquity Partners LLC Media/Tech Convergence Summit Wednesday in New York. Hanke said Google is expanding a […]

The European Commission is reminding Microsoft  that it’s still not entirely off the hook. The Commission issued a statement today warning the Redmond,Wash.-based software vendor that it could incur fines of up to or 3 million Euro per day (U.S. $3.85 million), counting from July 31, 2006, if it fails to fully comply with a […]