Thor Olavsrud

Attempting to cement its presence in the fiber-optics arena, communications and life sciences technology provider Agilent Technologies Inc. Tuesday moved to acquire fiber-optic technology laboratory Gefran Silicon Microsystem S.r.l for about $55 million in cash. Northern-Italy-based Silicon Microsystem is an operation of Gefran Sensori S.r.l., part of Gefran S.p.A. of Provaglio d’Iseo, Italy. Agilent said […]

With the Internet community”s attention turning increasingly to security in the wake of last week”s high profile attacks against Microsoft, the CERT Coordination Center Monday raised the possibility of vulnerabilities in software that serves as the basic foundational infrastructure of the Internet. CERT released an advisory detailing four security holes in older versions of the […]

Excite@Home, which Tuesday slashed its staff by 8 percent, Thursday met analysts expectations as it emerged from fourth quarter 2000 with a hopeful outlook for 2001. “We continue to set the pace for the growth of broadband services around the world,” said George Bell, chairman and chief executive officer of Excite@Home. “Leveraging our high-speed broadband […]

In the wake of settling the lawsuit over Java leveled by Sun Microsystems, Microsoft Corp. Thursday raised the curtain on a new set of tools aimed at helping Java users utilize its .NET platform. The tool set, called Java User Migration Path to Microsoft .NET (or JUMP to .NET for short) is, according to Microsoft, […]

Cisco Systems Inc. Thursday poured money into Japan’s struggling Internet investment house Softbank Corp. and committed to invest $1.05 billion in a private venture capital fund Softbank is initiating. The fund will target companies developing broadband, optical, wireless and Internet-based technologies across Asia. Cisco took a 1.65 percent stake in Softbank for $200 million, making […]

Intuit Inc. Thursday finalized the sale of selected assets of its QuickenInsurance business to InsWeb Corp. As part of the deal, Intuit received a 16.6 percent equity stake — valued at about $11.4 million — in InsWeb, and the two companies also sealed an agreement making InsWeb the exclusive consumer insurance aggregator for Intuit’s Quicken.com […]

Challenging the notion that Dow Jones & Co. is the stodgy traditionalist of the financial indexes, the firm Thursday revealed it will issue its first indexes of telecommunications bandwidth prices in the second quarter of 2001. The Dow Jones index unit last week met with a group of telecom carriers and energy trading companies — […]

At least one Internet company seems to be thriving under current market conditions. VeriSign Inc. Wednesday reported results for its fourth quarter that shattered Wall Street’s expectations by topping earnings estimates by 10 cents per share. Stratton Sclavos, president and chief executive of VeriSign, attributed the company’s explosive growth — which saw revenues increase 613 […]

Wireless broadband networking company Proxim Inc. Wednesday made a $223 million stock-for-stock play for broadband Internet equipment developer Netopia Inc. with the aim of speeding deployment of broadband wireless, cable and DSL services. Proxim will exchange .3 shares of Proxim common stock for each common stock share of Netopia , which adds up to about […]

Online travel company Travelocity may employ the latest in encryption technology to defend its customers against prying eyes, but that doesn’t do much to protect them against human error, as the company learned Monday. An insecure directory, inadvertently left on one of the company’s Web servers, may have exposed up to 45,000 names, addresses, phone […]

A federal appeals court in Virginia Monday affirmed a lower court’s ruling that online service provider Virtual Works Inc. violated the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act when it registered the domain vw.net with the intent to sell it to Volkswagen of America. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond found evidence of bad […]

In a not entirely unexpected move, major cable broadband player Excite@Home Tuesday laid off 250 employees — about 8 percent of its total complement of 3,000 — citing a slowing online advertising market. The cuts, focused primarily on its Internet media content business Excite Studios, include positions in advertising sales, finance, human resources and marketing. […]