The federal cabinet found Globalive Wireless complies with Canadian ownership and control requirements, overturning an October ruling by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and paving the way for the company’s Wind Mobile brand to enter the wireless market. Wasting no time, Globalive said it would offer service for Research in Motion Inc.’s BlackBerry Bold 9700.
The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Microsoft Corp. to remove custom XML from Word by Jan. 11, 2010, upholding an August verdict ruling that the company wilfully infringed on Toronto-based i4i Inc.’s patent. Microsoft subsequently released a patch to strip the XML technology from Word 2007 and Office 2007.
Nortel continued to sell off its assets, this time entering into a stalking-horse agreement with Genband to sell its carrier VoIP and application solutions business for US$282 million.
Avaya Inc. finalized its purchase of Nortel’s enterprise division but a study by IntelliCom Analytics said it won’t be enough to dominate Cisco Systems Inc. in the business communications space. Meanwhile, Cisco is set to expand its videoconferencing offerings beyond its TelePresence systems by buying Norwegian videoconferencing vendor Tandberg SA after extending the deadline on the buyout offer and raising the value.
PC and Web security vendor Prevx blamed what has been called the “black screen of death” on Microsoft security updates issued in November, only to later apologize to Microsoft saying malware infections were the true cause.
Oracle Corp. issued a set of commitments to assure the European Commission that it will invest in the open source database MySQL after it acquires Sun Microsystems Corp., but some just aren’t buying it. Meanwhile, MySQL creator Monty Widenius launched a campaign to save the database from Oracle’s clutches. And, after three years of deliberations, Sun Microsystems Corp.’s Java Enterprise Edition 6 received approval.
Twitter found itself facing a new rival when middleware vendor Tibco Software Inc. said it is preparing to release Tibbr, a similar messaging system for the enterprise that lets users follow subjects and people.
In a move against Google, a deal is finalized that will see Microsoft’s Bing search engine power Yahoo Inc.’s search results, providing both companies premium search-advertising services. Google released the Mac beta of its Chrome browser after one year of development.
Rumours surfaced that Apple Inc. could be testing a new iPhone model after usage logs for an application built by a San Francisco developer show an iPhone identifying itself as “iPhone 3,1.” The newest version, iPhone 3GS, used “iPhone 2,1” as an identifier.
Research In Motion Inc. suffered two service outages in the same week, leaving customers unable to receive messages.
Broadcom Corp. announced plans to acquire maker of high-speed switch fabrics Dune Networks Inc., a move that will bolster Broadcom’s chip offerings in the data centre networking gear space.
Chip maker Intel Corp. is faced with an antitrust-related lawsuit from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, stating it has used its market position in the past decade to create a monopoly. Intel responded, saying it “competed fairly and lawfully.”