Infrastructure

Continuing its assault on the highly competitive market for mobile phones designed to deliver high-speed, application-rich data services, Nokia Corp. is targeting the second quarter of 2004 for delivery of its first smart phone in the Americas.

Salesforce.com Inc. has created a plug-in for Microsoft Corp.'s Office that allows users to import data from the Salesforce.com online CRM (customer relationship management) service into Word, Excel and Outlook, the company said Wednesday.

Applications infrastructure company BEA Systems Inc. has inked a five-year deal to sell its software to a global airline consortium whose members will be able to exploit group purchasing discounts.

Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday released software designed to improve the performance of Windows applications designed for 32-bit processors when they are running on Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 processors.

Orange SA is poised to become the first mobile operator in Europe to offer a commercial push-to-talk service similar to the walkie-talkie service pioneered by Nextel Communications Inc. in the U.S. nearly a decade ago.

In the early 1990s, Mir Aimal Kansi, a known terrorist, was issued a visa and entered the United States. He purchased an AK-47, gunned down two CIA agents and wounded three others in front of the agency's headquarters. He then flew out of the country, dodging authorities until his capture in 1997. How did he accomplish all of this while avoiding getting caught? Easy: He dropped a single letter from his name.

VeriSign Inc. has been awarded a contract to manage a key component of a coming global distribution network that uses electronic product code (EPC) technology, according to a joint announcement by VeriSign and EPCglobal Inc., a non-profit organization.

Open source database provider MySQL AB is going after enterprise users with the release of its newest version of database software which the company released on Monday.