The Internet engineering community is stepping up efforts to develop a standard communications protocol for instant messaging, the pop-up style of online chatting that is popular with students and gaining ground in corporations as diverse as United Airlines Inc. and Compaq Computer Corp.
~More employees are checking their stock prices, shopping for travel bargains and exchanging personal e-mail via the Internet while at work - even though their companies prohibit these activities, according to a study released last week.
Is Web caching bad for the Internet? Debate on this question raged within the Internet engineering community last week, as leading Web-caching vendors caught flack for a communications protocol they developed to support load balancing and network-traffic redirection.
Aventail Corp. CEO Evan Kaplan spoke recently with Senior Editor Carolyn Duffy Marsan about the company's migration from a software manufacturer to a service provider and how it hopes to take advantage of the growing business-to-business e-commerce market.
Web surfers can conduct detailed searches and find information with pinpoint accuracy - at least that's the promise of Xdex, an indexing engine for Web information written in XML. Sequoia Software will ship Xdex tommorrow.
Is Web caching bad for the Internet? Debate on this question raged within the Internet engineering community last week, as leading Web-caching vendors caught flack for a communications protocol they developed to support load balancing and network-traffic redirection.
The unprecedented volatility of high-tech stocks last week sent shivers through the investment community. But Wall Street watchers say companies involved in the Internet's infrastructure - network equipment vendors and service providers - are among the best-positioned to weather these market storms.
CapitalStream, a Seattle provider of software for leasing brokers, will launch on Monday what the company claims is the first online exchange for matching businesses looking to finance equipment purchases with brokers, lenders and leasing companies.
The nation's leading aerospace companies have joined forces with software suppliers Commerce One Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to create what is expected to be the largest and most complex business-to-business e-commerce Web site ever built.
Online Lab of Dundee, Ill., has signed up more than 200 customers - including Virgin Airlines and Chiquita - for a Web site user feedback service launched in November.
It's the traveling executive's dream: By dialing a single number on a cellular phone, you can hear and reply to voice mail, e-mail and faxes. Even better, the system lets you respond to messages with the same commands - browse, save, skip, forward - that are commonplace in today's e-mail and voice mail systems.
When the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets next week in Adelaide, Australia, one topic that won't be on the agenda is wiretapping.
As expected, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has rejected a proposal to develop protocols that would make it easier for law enforcement agencies to intercept communications over the Net.
Two heavyweight holdouts - Cisco and Microsoft - last week threw their support behind IPv6, giving the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's primary communications protocol a much-needed boost.
Cisco Systems this week affirmed for the first time that its software and hardware products will support IPv6, an enhanced version of the communications protocol that underpins the Net.