Wolters Kluwer Tax, Accounting & Legal, a division of Wolters Kluwer, has announced that is has acquired the assets of Best Case Solutions, Inc. and that the company's Best Case Bankruptcy software and services will become part of the Wolters Kluwer Law & Business unit. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Wolters Kluwer Law & Business is a provider of research products and workflow tools in specialty areas for legal and business professionals.

Wolters Kluwer has also announced it has completed the acquisition of the NDCHealth Information Management Business. The Information Management business is now a part of Wolters Kluwer Health's Pharma Solutions unit and all IM products are adopting the brand name Source. NDCHealth Information Management's 384 employees are now a part of Wolters Kluwer Health's Pharma Solutions unit.

The acquisition took place at the agreed-upon purchase price of $382 million, paid in cash. This represents approximately a multiple of 2.3 times the IM group's anticipated 2005 revenues, and 10.6 times its adjusted EBITDA1. The acquisition is expected to be accretive to ordinary earnings per share in 2006 by approximately 3 Euro cents. Wolters Kluwer acquired NDCHealth Information Management from NDCHealth Corporation. The remainder of NDCHealth was secured by Per-Se Technologies.

(www.wolterskluwer.com; www.bestcase.com; www.ndchealth.com)

BBC Blast, in partnership with the Prince's Trust and Artswork led by the Arts Council of England, has been awarded £1m over three years from the Big Lottery Fund--Young People's Strategic Funds--for a program of creative activities aimed at young people from all communities.

Under the name HUB4, the money will enable the project to focus on four areas: Manchester, Newcastle, Norwich, and Southampton, to provide young people with creative and media skills training, learning opportunities, and progression routes. The program will target 13- to 24-year-olds (with a strong focus on 13- to 19-year-olds) who are 'disadvantaged' for social, cultural and/or economic reasons. The Prince's Trust will play a role in identifying and training the young people and so will Artswork.

BBC Blast, as the media partner, will provide ongoing online support and showcase opportunities for the creative content. As part of the contract, BBC Blast will co-ordinate showcase events at each city center in 2008 and 2009, where the Blast Truck will also be present. The money comes from £12.5m awarded by the Young People's Fund National Grants Programme to projects designed to make a difference to the lives of young people in England.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/blast)

Yahoo! Inc., a global Internet company, has announced the launch of Yahoo! Go, a new suite of products designed to extend the company's reach beyond the Web browser. Yahoo! Go services will allow a consumer to take a photo with their camera phone and instantly view it on their computer, television, or mobile phone through Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo! Go Mobile integrates the Internet into the mobile phone experience. The new service is designed to combine real-time connectivity with community, information, and content services from across the Web. Yahoo! Go Mobile also integrates the company's communications services with the phone's built-in email, messaging, address book, and calendar applications. Yahoo! Go Mobile will be available to consumers in select markets in the coming weeks.

Yahoo! Go TV will deliver the Internet to the PC-connected television. Yahoo! will also look to make the company's music offerings available through this new service. Yahoo! Go TV can improve the ability for consumers to navigate and find content on their television. Consumers will be able to use their remote control to see what's playing at their local theater or share pictures from a recent vacation with friends, on their television screen. The company expects to launch Yahoo! Go TV services in the coming months.

Yahoo! Go Desktop is a suite of applications designed to allow consumers to keep up-to-date on and interact with information. Consumers will be able to use the individual Yahoo! Go Desktop services to connect to the information online, without having to open a browser window on their personal computer. The initial services available as part of Yahoo! Go Desktop will be the Yahoo! Widgets Engine and a Yahoo! Go Desktop dashboard. The Yahoo! Go Desktop dashboard will connect consumers' personal content to their services and their Internet community. Consumers will be able to link their personal contacts to Yahoo! Local. The Yahoo! Widget Engine is an application that allows light-weight files called "Widgets" to live directly on a user's desktop and perform a variety of tasks, such as checking for wi-fi presence or strength, finding contacts in an address book, viewing a user's calendar, or checking their latest email. Widgets are built on an open platform, which allows any third party developer to build and distribute their own widgets. There are more than 1,500 Widgets available and the company expects to make the Yahoo! Go Desktop dashboard available in the coming months.

(www.yahoo.com)

Clear Channel Communications Inc., a US-based radio conglomerate, has announced plans to begin testing a free, music video-on-demand service as part of a strategy to bolster its Internet presence. The advertising supported service will be free to users.

Between 2,000 to 3,000 music videos from artists at Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group will be featured on some of its radio station Web sites and a third music label is likely to join, although a deal has not been finalized, according to company sources. The launch is part of a restructuring of its Internet properties across the nation. Last year, the radio company began offering site viewers originally produced interviews and shows with musicians. Clear Channel has also begun to offer downloadable podcasts. 

(www.clearchannel.com)  

Google Inc. has announced Google Pack beta, a free collection of safe software from Google and other companies designed to improve the user experience online and on the desktop.

Programs included in the Google Pack are: Adobe Reader 7; Ad-Aware SE Personal; GalleryPlayer HD Images; Google Desktop; Google Earth; Google Pack Screensaver; Google Talk; Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer; Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar; Norton AntiVirus 2005 Special Edition; Picasa; RealPlayer; and Trillian. Google Pack also includes Google Updater, a tool that downloads, installs, and maintains all the software in the Google Pack. Google Updater alerts users when updates and new programs become available and ensures each program is up-to-date. Google Updater can also be used to monitor the status of installation, run software that's been installed, or uninstall software.

Users can select which programs they want to install. For programs already installed on a computer, Google Updater checks whether the latest version is running. If not, Google Updater will install the latest version. Every program included in the Google Pack is free. Google Pack beta is available in English, runs on Windows XP, and supports Firefox 1.0 and higher and Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher.

Google has also announced the planned opening of the Google Video Store, an open video marketplace enabling consumers to buy and rent a range of video content from a major television network, a professional sports league, cable programmers, independent producers, and film makers. This collection of videos will include prime-time and classic hits from CBS, a full slate of NBA games from this season and performances from the past, music videos from SONY BMG, Charlie Rose interviews, as well as news and historical content from ITN, and new titles being added everyday. People who visit the Google Video homepage will be able to browse listings of video by category from the store or search Google's collection of videos by entering keywords into the search box.

(www.google.com)

Quintura Inc., a Web search company, has announced the release of Quintura Search 1.0. Quintura Search can help a user to find relevant information on the Web faster by offering a visual map of related tags or a context-based "tag cloud." Quintura Search offers tags or hints contextually related to a keyword, designed to specify the context or the meaning of the keyword. Adding or subtracting tags from the query using the visual map of tags and a mouse click, "One-Click-Search", allows a user to specify the context or meaning of the keyword. It narrows the search to help find relevant information faster even if it has low ranking and is not displayed on the first pages of search results.

In addition, using Quintura Search, a user can create and share personalized search scopes allowing for the Web search to become more personal by: creating a personalized search scope using tags related to a search query; making search scope more specific and personalize the scope by adding or subtracting tags using a visual map; refining search results removing search links or Web sites from the result list; saving the search scope as a file and sharing it with others; and monitoring new information becoming available on the Web related to personal interests of the user. Quintura Search 1.0 is a client side application that utilizes a regular search engine to send and retrieve the results of a query. Quintura Search is free and can be downloaded from the Web site.

(www.quintura.com)

Blast Radius, a provider of XML content creation and collaboration solutions, has announced it will include bidirectional support for XML content creation in its upcoming release of XMetaL Author and XMAX. Prior to this release, XMetaL fully supported the creation of content in Cyrillic and Asian languages, such as Chinese, Greek, Japanese, Korean and Russian. This release now incorporates the additional support of Middle Eastern languages--Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew.

(www.blastradius.com)   

Harvest Solutions, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) consulting and training firm, has announced its affiliation with Sendia Corporation as a Certified Sendia Partner. Sendia, a wireless business application platform company, develops and markets WorkSpace CRM--an application that extends existing enterprise applications, such as salesforce.com's CRM, to wireless handheld devices.

As a Certified Sendia Partner, Harvest Solutions is now qualified to sell Sendia's WorkSpace CRM and perform full-scale implementations of the application to its customers who use salesforce.com. WorkSpace CRM for Salesforce is an application that wirelessly delivers CRM data to field sales teams so that customer information remains accessible on a handheld device, even when the user is outside of a wireless coverage area.

(www.harvestsolutions.net; www.sendia.com)  

ScholarOne has announced that Taylor & Francis, an international academic publisher, has increased its current contract with ScholarOne to license Manuscript Central for the online peer-review management of 300 journals worldwide. Manuscript Central will be integrated with Taylor & Francis' current workflow, including connection with its in-house electronic systems.

(www.scholarone.com; www.taylorandfrancisgroup.com; www.tfinforma.com)