James Niccolai

A newspaper report Monday that Cisco Systems Inc. plans to enter the mainstream consumer electronics market is only the latest sign of its ambitions to expand beyond computer networking equipment.

Europe's future search engine doesn't want to be found just yet. A project to develop advanced multimedia search technologies led by France's Thomson SA has gone into hiding in the face of intense publicity this week that it is building a "Google killer" that will help to improve Europe's standing in the high-tech world.

Travellers who stayed at the upmarket Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas should keep a close eye on their bank statements in the months ahead. The hotel has admitted to an apparent database break-in in which personal information for 55,000 guests may have been stolen, including credit card and bank account numbers.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and private equity firm Blackstone Group are reportedly considering bidding for Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), the second sizable buyout of an outsourcing company said to be in the works this week.

IBM Corp. has agreed to buy network management software vendor Micromuse Inc. for US$865 million in cash, the companies announced Wednesday. IBM said the move would allow it to offer its customers better technology for dealing with increasingly mixed traffic in their networks produced by VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and other online voice and video services.

JBoss Inc. has added to its Java middleware stack by acquiring transaction processing software from Arjuna Technologies Ltd. and Hewlett-Packard Co., JBoss announced Monday. The acquisition marks a shift in strategy for JBoss, which until now has acquired or partnered with open source companies.

A Dutch company has launched a new Internet addressing service that does away with the most common top-level domains (TLDs), such as .com and .edu, and allows organizations and individuals to register Internet addresses that end with the name of their business, or virtually any other word they choose.

Microsoft Corp. is extending the popular RSS 2.0 Web syndication format to make it "multidirectional," allowing it to be used for synchronizing information such as contacts and calendar entries across different applications, the company said.