m-Travel.com and Travel Distribution News

Archive Category: Standards

Forrester CEO looks above IT iceberg waterline

By George F. Colony | CEO, President, Forrester Research

Thesis: Some of IT is a commodity -- but much of it remains a source of competitive advantage.

Argument: Surely one of the great inanities of 2003 is Harvard Business Review's May 2003 article, "IT Doesn't Matter." You know that you are about to come roaring out of a bad tech cycle when the general business press begins to predict the death, maturation, or irrelevancy of the industry. When the minicomputer business augured in during the 1980s, and the PC market went moribund in the early 1990s, the obits were posted. Oops.

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Free Wi-Fi access at Sundance Film Festival

PARK CITY, Utah -- The much talked about independent film Levity opened the Sundance Film Festival this week. There was another debut that serves as a strong indicator of how fast and how far wireless Internet access is growing. HotSpotzz, one of the largest providers of wireless hot spots, is making its Park City debut by offering Sundance Film Festival goers, stars and staff free Wi-Fi Internet access. 

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Vertical markets split on mobile operating system

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- Vertical markets continue to deploy mobile solutions in order to increase worker productivity. Although mobility has been embraced in vertical markets, a standard operating system (OS) has not. According to a recent vertical market survey of nearly 1,000 members of IDC's Mobile Advisory Council, the Palm OS remains entrenched in healthcare, education, and government segments while Windows CE/Pocket PC is the preferred platform for mobility solutions within field sales/service and utilities segments.

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Mass market telematics test starts in Europe

LEUVEN, Belgium -- ACUNIA, a pioneer in the emerging automotive telematics industry, is playing a key role in Europe's Third Generation Telematics (3GT) project. The 3GT project runs from June 2002 through November 2003 and is supported by the EC Information Society Directorate General.

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Maporama joins UDDI e-commerce standards

PARIS -- Maporama, a leading provider of online location-centric applications, has joined the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration project (UDDI). This project is an industry initiative working to enable businesses to quickly, easily and dynamically find and transact with one another using a preferred application.

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March toward m-commerce moves forward

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France -- The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) reports that is being accelerated with the establishment of a new Specialist Task Force (STF). The STF will support the work of ETSI Project M-Commerce (EP M-Comm) in the development of mobile signatures, which will be used to authenticate the identity of a person doing business on a mobile telephone in the same way that a written signature guarantees the identity of a person signing a written contract.

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OpenTravel seeks comment on XML version

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia -- The OpenTravel Alliance (OTA) has released Version 2002A of its Extensible Markup Language (XML) specification for public review. Addressing multiple levels of interoperability across the travel verticals, Version 2002A enables organizations of all sizes to implement complex online transactions.

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Wireless network providers form association

LUXEMBOURG -- Five WLAN public access service providers and five WLAN vendors announced the establishment of the Pass-One, an association formed to boost the WLAN (wireless local area network) hot spot business and to promote one global service mark. A key success factor of the public WLAN hotspot industry will be to offer a network, substantially large enough to be attractive to the end-user, the founders said.

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Newtrade announces OpenTravel XML conformity

MONTREAL -- Newtrade Technologies Inc., a travel commerce systems company, has developed and implemented XML interfaces that conform to the OpenTravel Alliance (OTA) specifications. As an active OTA member, Newtrade's announcement said that it had contributed to the refinement of the OTA hotel message specifications, a standard set of XML messages, that facilitate data communication between hotels and all hospitality partners.

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European groups plan m-commerce standards

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France -- The European Committee for Banking Standards (ECBS) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have signed a co-operation agreement to increase the effectiveness of their efforts towards the development of standards for the security of telecommunications and m-commerce.

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