@Stake, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, security services start-up consisting of businessmen and hackers, has announced that it has received US$10 million in initial venture capital funding from Battery Ventures. The company's mission is to help organizations build secure e-commerce systems by safeguarding network connections, applications and content. The company lineup includes Chairman John Rando, formerly a Compaq Computer Corp. senior vice president; Vice President of Marketing Ted Julian, formerly of Forrester Research Inc.; and the vice president of research and development, who simply goes by the name Mudge. Mudge served as CEO/chief scientist at L0pht Heavy Industries, a hacker think tank.
The Federal Communications Commission has named David Farber, a telecommunications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as its chief technologist. Farber will replace Stagg Newman, who steps down Jan. 14. According to an FCC statement, Newman is moving to North Carolina for family reasons and will become Senior Telecommunications Practice Expert at consulting company McKinsey and Co. Farber heads the Center for Communications & Information Science & Policy and the Laboratory for Distributed Systems at Penn. He directs research in ultrahigh-speed networking, computer architecture design and distributed collaboration methodology.
Wal-Mart won't be just your neighborhood retailing behemoth anymore. The heaviest of the brick-and-mortar heavyweights this week announced that it will create a Palo Alto independent company -- Wal-Mart.com -- in order to speed development of its online retail site. Venture capital firm Accel Partners will join with Wal-Mart in the undertaking. The Wal-Mart.com board will include Wal-Mart Chairman Rob Walton; Lee Scott, vice-chairman and chief operating officer of Wal-Mart; and James Breyer, managing partner of Accel.
Inprise has said it will launch the new version of its InterBase database management system as open source software. The company will release the source code for Version 6 of its SQL database for Linux, Windows NT and Solaris at an unspecified date early this year. The Scotts Valley, California, firm will continue to sell and support InterBase 5.6 through normal channels.
Allied Telesyn later this month will release an unmanaged 10/100M-bit/sec Ethernet switch with gigabit uplinks. The AT-FS909SX has eight Fast Ethernet ports and a 1000Base-SX uplink. The company says the switch is the first in a series and costs US$923.
If you had to design the ideal frame relay service, it would provide lots of ports in cities in which you have the most sites, national and international coverage, gobs of managed service options and a watertight service-level agreement (SLA). Oh, and it would be cheap, too.
Lotus last week began shipping new Java-based collaboration software, Sametime 1.0, that lets users monitor the online status of colleagues, swap instant messages and share applications in real time. The product includes a Sametime Server, Sametime Connect Client, application development tools and a series of Sametime-enabled templates that work with Lotus Notes 4.6 and 5.0.
Cisco Systems Inc. this week announced SNA Print Server for CIP (Cisco's Channel Interface Processor), which lets tn3270 users print mainframe data from a central dedicated print server. Cisco's CIP directly links the firm's Series 7000 and 7500 routers to the mainframe. Previously, remote Cisco tn3270 server users had to install and configure individual print gateways to print off the host.