Sean Michael Kerner

Sabre Holdings today announced that it was acquiring European discount travel site lastminute.com in a deal valued at up to $1.08 billion. According to Sabre Holdings, the deal will provide greater scale for their Travelocity online travel portal. Lastminute.com offered a rival service to Sabre Holdings Travelocity Europe portal. Following the close of the deal, […]

Open source has been a disruptive influence across a swath of industries. One of the areas in which it has made significant inroads is the VoIP space, particularly due to the tremendous success of the Asterisk open source VoIP PBX project. Version 1.0 of Asterisk was released in September and includes traditional PBX services, as […]

Microsoft plans to offer a security and maintenance service designed to tend to the health of PCs — and improve the user’s experience. Called Windows OneCare, the subscription-based service would provide automated performance tuning, maintenance, anti-spyware and anti-virus protection. On the maintenance side, OneCare is designed to automatically deal with routine tasks such as disk […]

The Mozilla Foundation has moved quickly to patch three critical issues in its browsers that were discovered just last weekend. FireFox 1.0.4 and Mozilla 1.7.8 were released today to patch vulnerabilities that could have allowed malicious users to execute arbitrary code. Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2005-43 describes one of the flaws as “Wrapped javascript: urls […]

Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Computer, has made a $99.5 million dollar investment in Linux vendor Red Hat. The investment was made through his investment group, MSD Capital, and involved the purchase of Red Hat debentures in January 2005, according to regulatory filings made with the SEC. The purchase could potentially be converted […]

Things may soon go a lot smoother at London’s Heathrow Airport, thanks to a VoIP deal announced today between Cisco Systems and British Airways. Cisco will deploy VoIP to over 14,000 British Airways staff, which will use 8,500 Cisco IP phones at its U.K. offices and airports. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, […]

Enterprise VoIP spending was up by 46 percent in 2004 and service revenues are forecast to grow by over 1,400 percent over the next five years according to Infonetics Research. Yet despite the rosy predictions, not all segments of the North American marketplace are currently broadly embracing VoIP. Though future predictions for the market are […]

Microsoft users got a near free pass as the company issued a single critical patch today. As part of its monthly patch cycle, Microsoft also expanded its monthly advisory reporting going beyond security bulletins with additional items that impact users’ security. All told May’s security tally includes one security bulletin for its Windows Media Player […]

Online was the place to buy for mom this year, according to stats released today by VeriSign . The Mother’s Day stats were compiled for the period of April 25 through May 8 from Verisign Payment Services, which represents over 135,000 etailers handling 37 percent of all North American e-commerce. The $4.4 billion racked up […]

Novell added to its Linux security portfolio today with its purchase of security vendor Immunix, which has been a player in the Linux security space since its inception in 1998. One of Immunix’ contributions is the Linux Security Modules (LSM) framework, a key part of how the Linux kernel 2.6 implements security policies. LSM is […]

The continuing popularity of wireless e-mail applications drove a 25 percent jump in first-quarter PDA shipments, according to new research from Gartner. All told, 3.4 million PDAs were shipped in the first three months of the year, up from 2.7 million during the same period last year. In addition, the average selling price (ASP) of […]

TORONTO — It’s not enough just to put up a site and support it with a search engine campaign. You need to utilize Web analytics tools. That’s the message coming out of a number of panels at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) show that wrapped up here this week. Experts contend that Web analytics are […]