Enterprise Apps

East Coast grocer Stop & Shop has introduced shopping carts that give consumers Internet accessibility at their fingertips. The smart carts, from IBM and Cuesol of Quincy, Massachusetts, feature on-board IBM touchscreen computers that double as personal assistants when the laser scanner on the c...

The move to add tiny radio antennas on shipments of pharmaceuticals will not be enough to prevent counterfeiting and tampering, analysts said. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and several drug makers announced they would be putting RFID-tagged labels on medicine bottles beginning with the impo...

Don't breath a sigh of relief yet. Although PeopleSoft's board announced today it unanimously rejected Oracle's "best and final" offer of $24 a share, it ain't over till it's over, and it ain't over. The takeover bid is now in the hands of PeopleSoft's shareholders, who must decide by Nov. 19 wheth...

Making inroads into the next major market for software isn't going to happen from enterprise vendors trying to wedge expensive, large application footprints into a product strategy that appeals to medium-sized companies. Despite Oracle, Siebel and others proclaiming they can make this strategy work...

Intermec Technologies has cleared the path for retail companies to test second-generation radio-frequency identification (RFID) products and move toward wide-scale adoption. The company will suspend for 60 days its intellectual property licenses to stimulate RFID manufacturers to create and test sys...

Salesforce.com today announced the expansion of its on-demand service with Winter '05. The product line includes Salesforce.com Winter '05, Supportforce.com Winter '05, sforce 5.0 and the new on-demand customization toolkit, Customforce.com. Winter '05 will provide the applications, customization to...

Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia and semiconductor maker Royal Philips Electronics plan to test a contactless transportation payment system in Germany next year. The pair are working with Rhein-Main Verkehrsverbund (RMV) public transportation authority on a pilot program that will allow consumers to ...

Finally, there's an end in sight. PeopleSoft stockholders have until Nov. 19 to tender their stock for Larry Ellison's "best and final offer" of $24 a share -- cash -- or $9.2 billion for the whole enchilada. If they don't, Ellison has promised to call it quits, something the multibillionaire mogul ...

Each season, Legoland Denmark welcomes 1.6 million guests, and about 1,600 of them end up getting lost. This spring, the theme park adopted an AeroScout RFID location solution, offering parents use of an RFID bracelet for their children at a nominal fee. If their children wander away from them in th...

The European Commission, the regulatory body of the European Union, today removed the final anti-trust barrier to Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft. Not only did the European Commission meeting in Brussels, Belgium, end its yearlong consideration of the merger in Oracle's favor, it did so without stip...

The Food and Drug Administration recently green-lighted a product called VeriChip, a coded radio chip that, when picked up by a radio-frequency reader in an ambulance or hospital emergency room, yields a code that unlocks a patient's medical stats from a central database. Unsurprisingly, the chips, ...

Unisys has been receiving a lot of attention lately, including accolades from IDC and Frost & Sullivan and a spot in the most recent edition of the book CRM at the Speed of Light. But there's been bad news as well. The company posted lower-than-expected third-quarter profits. Nearly a week ago, ...

NetSuite today announced the availability of its version 10, a unique hosted solution that links the company's proprietary CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and e-commerce applications in a single Web-based architecture for small and mid-sized businesses. The version, in development for months...

A recent Gartner report predicts a 50 percent failure rate for radio frequency identification projects implemented between now and the end of the year. However, those involved in industry alliances and manufacturer projects that pull together best-in-class vendors proclaim that RFID is more than a ...

Siebel Systems launched what it calls an "end-to-end enterprise business intelligence solution." The product recognizes a need for analytics that can compile many sources of information into a single data warehouse. At its "User Week" in Los Angeles, Siebel announced BI applications for financials, ...