Viacom Inc. has sued YouTube and Google in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom's entertainment properties. The suit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, as well as an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. The complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

(www.viacom; www.google.com; www.youtube.com)

OCLC Online Computer Library Center has acquired TechAtlas technology planning software with a $1.9 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. WebJunction, OCLC's online community where library staff share ideas and use online resources to help them in their work, will further develop this web-based technology management and planning tool with particular attention to helping public libraries create E-Rate compliant technology plans. With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, OCLC will take over ownership of the TechAtlas product, and WebJunction will begin a round of design and development work to extend TechAtlas features, such as expanding the ability to allow consortia to review and approve technology plans for their member libraries.

WebJunction will also be providing TechAtlas to libraries participating in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's U.S. Libraries initiative's grant-making efforts. Special TechAtlas features can help these eligible libraries to deliver information to the foundation about their technology infrastructure, will assist in grant evaluation, and will provide data to state library agencies on the public access computing "landscape" in their communities. OCLC will continue to support NPower's community of TechAtlas users while further developing the product as part of WebJunction's services for libraries. OCLC will continue to offer TechAtlas to WebJunction members at no cost.

(www.oclc.org; www.webjunction.org; www.gatesfoundation.org)

Eurekster, Inc., a provider of social search has secured $5.5 million in a Series B financing. Eurekster's institutional financing was led by Technology Venture Partners (TVP) of Australia and Transcosmos Investments of Japan with the participation of the private investors who provided the company's initial Series A financing. The proceeds will enable Eurekster to accelerate the company's growth and expand the commercial and global scope of its product offering.

(www.eurekster.com; www.transcosmos.com; www.tvp.com.au)

Ektron Inc., a technology and market provider of web content management software, has unveiled the latest version of CMS400.NET, designed to enable organizations to create, deploy, and manage interactive web, intranet, and extranet sites. CMS400.NET V7.0 is designed to enable customers to build interactive sites that foster a strong online community, and include features such as advanced navigation and built-in taxonomy to get information into the hands of site visitors. CMS400.NET V7.0 also introduces geo-encoded mapping and wiki collaboration features which provide navigational taxonomy structure to articles and interwiki links.

(www.ektron.com)

Widen Enterprises, a hosted provider of marketing and creative applications, has released Media Collective 4.2, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) and catalog publishing solution. Widen's focus for the spring release included rich media transformations, interface design around user requirements, and continued systems integration using web services.

Specifically the following items are part of the 4.2 release: improved handling of rich media with on-demand conversions of audio files designed for easier repurposing in various marketing channels; collaborative workflow additions with DAM integration complete with batch reviews for photography approvals; user interface upgrades include rollover functionality to reveal metadata and provide additional search results display options; an enhanced cropping tool advances creative support within the application to provide cropping on-demand permission for inline photo editing; additional web services support is designed to allow Widen customers to integrate custom workflows using data stored in third party systems for real time updates; and the ability to export to InDesign within the catalog publishing component which leverages Adobe InDesign server to create catalogs and brochures on-demand using approved brand assets.

(www.widen.com)

Kazeon, a provider of unstructured information management, has announced recent findings based on the results of its new Data Assessment Service. According to results of the data assessment service, Kazeon found that, on average, half of all unmanaged data is stale and only one quarter of data is actually current and relevant to the organization's business. In addition, an average of 18% of all stored data was deemed to be duplicate information and an average 4% of stored data was found to be completely unrelated to business. The Kazeon Data Assessment Program is designed to help customers educate themselves and determine the impact on their storage budgets for archiving less-frequently used data.

Kazeon's Data Assessment Service, based on the IS1200-FRM, provides insight into data usage and value through the delivery of a standard set of reports across a "slice" of a customer's storage environment. This baseline information is designed to enable IT to understand how their storage is being utilized and provides a foundation for further actions and initiatives. The Kazeon Data Assessment Service is a one-week program during which Kazeon consultants will utilize the IS1200-FRM to automatically gather information within a customer's environment. Kazeon consultants then embed reports into a final document that alert companies to various factors such as file duplication, frequency of access, and frequency of updates to files. The service is currently available at $10,000 which includes the delivery and rental of the IS1200-FRM, configuration and set up, data collection of a representative 4 TB sample of data, and the delivery of a detailed final document.

(www.kazeon.com)

NewsGator Technologies, Inc., a RSS company, has announced the availability of NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry and NewsGator Go! for Java mobile RSS readers designed for BlackBerry and other Java-enabled mobile devices. NewsGator Go! gives individual and business users the ability to access news and other content from any RSS-enabled source through virtually any mobile device. NewsGator Go! delivers sports scores, world news, weather updates, and relevant business-related content.

Key features and benefits of NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry and Java include:?the ability for content, including articles and links, to be automatically formatted to accommodate limited bandwidth and screen size; the ability for NewsGator Go!, users to access information that normally would take much longer to view using a standard phone browser. The reader's single window format allows users to access all relevant information, rather than visiting multiple websites to access the information they need; RSS subscriptions and content are fully synchronized across NewsGator's entire suite of products, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, NewsGator Online, and NewsGator Inbox. Articles marked as "read" on their mobile device will show up as "read" on their other NewsGator applications; synchronization with NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand; clippings synchronization; the ability to mark feeds and articles as read from your mobile device; and the ability to share articles with friends and co-workers via email on their mobile device.

NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry and NewsGator Go! for Java is available for BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and most other MID-P 2.0 mobile phones, including Samsung, Sanyo and LG. NewsGator Go! is available for $29.95 or $14.95 if bought with any of NewsGator's desktop readers, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Inbox. NewsGator Go! products can also be purchased at the NewsGator website.

(www.newsgator.com)

MindTouch, a vendor of business wiki solutions, has launched Wik.is, a community wiki site designed to simplify collaboration and knowledge sharing for friends and family members, businesses, associations, students, and educators.

Wik.is kicks off with 42,000 existing wikis from users worldwide. Within minutes, new and current community members can create, edit, share, store, and search documents, emails, images, and files through a graphical interface. It functions and looks like a slimmed-down Word processor inside of a web browser. There are two levels of the Wik.is service: free and Pro. Users of the free service receive a public wiki supported by contextual advertisements on its pages and 1 GB of storage.

The Pro package provides Wik.is site owners with a private wiki that integrates with their existing website for a unified look and feel and navigation across the site. This can increase community interactions while making the wiki a cohesive element of an organization's overall online presentation and mission. The Pro service costs $60 per year. Additional features of the package include: privacy, which makes the wiki accessible only to invited users; page permissions, which makes pages and sub-pages private or read-only; a customizable URL so that customers can choose a custom domain or sub-domain; additional storage of 10GB; and no advertisements.

(www.mindtouch.com; www.wik.is)  

CMS Watch, a vendor-neutral analyst firm that evaluates content management, enterprise search, and portal technologies, will release The ECM Suites Report in April 2007. The forthcoming report will sort through the complexities of choosing the right tool for managing documents and records at the enterprise level. The report closely examines 10 major ECM Suite vendors: Alfresco; EMC|Documentum; Hyland; IBM/FileNet; Interwoven; Microsoft; Open Text/Hummingbird; Oracle/Stellent; Vignette; and Xerox. It also includes shorter profiles of 20 other offerings, e.g., CA/MDY, Docubase, NewGen, Nuxeo, Saperion, TOWER, Xythos, and more. The report will be available at the CMS Watch website on April 16th, 2007.

(www.cmswatch.com)

Nimsoft, Inc., a provider of service level management, has announced that it is working with Oracle to provide Oracle customers with a software solution for delivering SAP R/3 monitoring and performance data. Under a newly signed cooperative development agreement, Nimsoft and Oracle plan to integrate NimBUS with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to provide Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g customers the ability to monitor and manage SAP R/3. The two companies plan to work together to develop and jointly market the NimBUS SAP R/3 Plug In for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. The companies will jointly market NimBUS SAP R/3 Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, which is projected to be available to customers in Q2007.

The NimBUS SAP R/3 Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g can provide multi-instance SAP R/3 monitoring designed to deliver vital health status information. NimBUS will provide Oracle Enterprise Manager with performance metrics, availability, and end-user experience monitoring for SAP R/3 applications. NimBUS provides broad platform support for the IT configurations that SAP R/3 supports. Pricing for the NimBUS SAP R/3 Plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g starts at $20,000.

(www.nimsoft.com; www.oracle.com)

MotionDSP, a provider of digital video technology, has announced Ikena Copyright, a copyright detection technology that matches content solely on the video content. Ikena Copyright uses a (patent-pending) component of MotionDSP's military-grade video enhancement technology. As opposed to audio-matching methods, MotionDSP's technology creates a 'video fingerprint' by tracking the motion characteristics of the video.

Features of Ikena Copyright include: a video signature system that stands up to many 'attacks' such as: editing where it can identify clips as small as 20 seconds; low-bitrate compression where it can identify clips that have been re-encoded (i.e.: from their native format to Adobe Flash internet video); aspect ratio change from 16:9 content compressed into a 4:3 display, or 4:3 stretched to 16:9; cropping the sides of a video; and video quality change so Ikena Copyright can identify videos which have been converted to B+W, or had their color distorted. Ikena Copyright has been designed to scale to a very large database of content, operating on a high volume of matching (i.e.: a database of thousands of hours of copyrighted video, matching tens of thousands of uploaded videos per day).

(www.motiondsp.com)

MarketResearch.com, a distributor of market intelligence, has announced a business partnership with Country Risk South Africa which allows for the marketing and distribution of Country Risk South Africa's proprietary market analyses through the MarketResearch.com website.

The new relationship offers business professionals throughout the world access to complete product descriptions and tables of contents from research publications authored by Country Risk South Africa. At the same time, visitors to the MarketResearch.com website have the ability to purchase the material directly through MarketResearch.com's secure server.

Country Risk South Africa's premier report, Opportunities and Risks: South Africa's Liquid Fuels Industry 2007-2009, analyzes market trends and investment opportunities in South Africa's liquid fuels industry as well as underlying country and political risks including taxation discriminations, equity restrictions, operational restrictions, repatriation restrictions, exchanges controls, and labor policies.

(www.marketresearch.com)  

Biz Technology Solutions Inc (BTS), a provider of full-service technology solutions for the healthcare industry, and SearchInform Technologies, a developer of corporate search solutions, have announced a non-exclusive partnership agreement to distribute SearchInform solutions. Biz Technology Solutions, Inc develops, delivers, and supports integrated technology solutions for the healthcare community. SearchInform's search capabilities are designed to enable the customer to perform full text phrasal search for documents of similar content and query. This allows for assessment of documents in a multitude of formats.

(www.biztechnologysolutions.com; www.searchinform.com)

CommVault, a provider of Unified Data Management solutions, has announced a channel distribution agreement with Israeli distributor, BenefIT Technologies. Under the channel agreement, BenefIT will market, sell, and support the full suite of CommVault products across the territory, including CommVault's data protection, archive, replication, and resource management software. Additionally, BenefIT will work in conjunction with CommVault's emerging markets sales team to pursue new business opportunities in the region within industries such as telecommunications.

(www.commvault.com; www.benefit-tech.co.il)