divine, inc. announced February 25, that its board of directors has authorized divine and several of its subsidiaries to file a voluntary petition to reorganize under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. divine expects operations to continue uninterrupted and has retained critical staff during the Chapter 11 reorganization and sale process. Casas, Benjamin & White LLC (CBW), a financial advisory firm that specializes in corporate restructurings, will assist divine's current management team in handling day-to-day operations. This news come only one week after divine announced that its efforts to minimize operating costs and liabilities had been unsuccessful and it had enlisted Broadview International LLC to explore options for further reducing expenses. divine and CBW intend to continue to explore strategic options with Broadview, including the possible sale of its assets, in order to maximize return to creditors. divine has received a letter of intent from financial investment firm GTCR Golder Rauner LLC to acquire divine's business in its entirety. Any sale of divine's assets would be subject to section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code, final approval of the Bankruptcy Court, and an auction process to yield the highest and best offer. divine's filing of Chapter 11 was announced approximately one month after it announced the sale of RoweCom, a subsidiary subscription management business, to EBSCO. At the end of January, RoweCom filed for bankruptcy and announced a 14-count lawsuit against divine, alleging that divine mishandled over $73.7 million in RoweCom funds.

(http://www.divine.com)

Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a developer of search and real-time alert technologies, and Overture Services, Inc., a provider of pay-for-performance search to Internet portals and Web sites, have entered into an agreement under which Overture will acquire FAST's Internet business unit for $70 million in cash, as well as performance-based cash incentive payments for up to $30 million over three years. Under the terms of the agreement, Overture will acquire FAST's Internet business unit assets including FAST Web Search, AlltheWeb.com, and FAST PartnerSite products, related intellectual property rights, as well as data centers and equipment in Sacramento and London. In addition, the FAST Internet business unit personnel will transfer to Overture. The agreement is subject to standard review and regulatory processes, which the two companies anticipate will be completed by April 2003. Overture has also licensed FAST Data Search. This news comes one week after Overture announced its acquisition of search engine, AltaVista, for $140 million in cash and stock.

(http://www.fastsearch.com)

A wholly owned subsidiary of Open Text Corporation has acquired all the issued and outstanding shares of Corechange, Inc. Corechange is a portal software provider, whose main product is Coreport, an enterprise access framework for deploying intranet and extranet portals. Benefits of integration with Open Text's Livelink, a collaboration and knowledge management system, include: enhancement of Livelink connectors Livelink UNITE and Livelink Doorways; application integration at the point of access; and direct interaction with any kind of application running on any platform both Web and legacy. This cash transaction will not result in an immediate or material financial change in guidance for Open Text ‘s fiscal 2003 year. For further information, please consult Open Text's 8K filing.  

(http://www.corechange.com), (http://www.opentext.com), (http://www.opentext.com/livelink)

According to a new report from Probe Research, Inc. entitled "North American CDN Markets," the content delivery network (CDN) market will begin to regain revenues in 2003. At the same time, Probe expects that the line between CDNs and hosting will disappear as hosting providers offer more CDN-like services and CDN providers expand beyond basic content delivery. "North American CDN Markets" looks at the handful of players left in the space and forecasts overall revenues to 2007. The report predicts that the market, which grew about 10% in 2002, will grow more than 20% in 2003 and sustain reasonable growth thereafter. Two of the main players have already reached profitability, with a third close. Probe questions Akamai's ability to bounce back from falling revenues in 2002, and predicts a possible sale by the end of 2003. Enterprise CDNs (eCDNs), whether set up and maintained by the enterprise itself or offered as a service by CDN providers and other carriers, are expected to become increasingly widespread in 2003. Since high set-up costs may deter some enterprises from setting up these networks, service providers such as Akamai, Sprint, Qwest, Equant, and IBM have developed their own. According to Probe, no new players will emerge in 2003, and competition will come from other service providers moving into the space, in addition to hosting providers. Only a couple of players are expected to remain that offer plain CDN services, while others will fight it out based on content types supported, Web services, security services, and other edge services such as content transformation and optimization.

(http://www.proberesearch.com)

Reuters and Factiva have announced an expanded relationship designed to increase customer access to Factiva's content through Reuters products. Under the three-year agreement, selected Factiva content will be embedded in Reuters financial products, including Reuters 3000Xtra and Reuters BridgeStation. The agreement covers two types of Factiva services. Global Press Watch, a collection of articles from more than 550 national newspapers and 50 national news wires, will be integrated in Reuters products aimed at trading and investment professionals. Secondly, Knowledge Worker, a five-year archive of nearly 6000 periodicals, news weeklies, and specialist publications organized by industry sector, will be a component of Reuters products for research-intensive financial professionals and investment advisors. Both services will be included at no additional charge to Reuters customers. For local-language services, Reuters will integrate Factiva sources, including newspapers and news wires, in the language of the target customer base. This announcement builds on Reuters' previous distribution arrangement, which made Factiva available only to Reuters 3000 Xtra.  Under the new agreement Factiva content will be embedded for access within Reuters products including the latest version of Reuters 3000 Xtra (v4.5) as well as Reuters BridgeStation, domestic products, products such as Reuters Knowledge, and future products targeted at financial professionals.

(http://www.factiva.com), (http://www.reuters.com)

Reinacker & Associates, Inc. has released NewsGator 1.0, a news aggregator for Microsoft Outlook. NewsGator retrieves news from multiple sources such as weblogs and news sites that support the RSS syndication format, and integrates the news items into Outlook folders. NewsGator also includes a "NewsPage", which is a single page summarizing all of the unread posts in your news folders. NewsGator 1.0 is available immediately.  Pricing is $29/copy with quantity discounts available. NewsGator requires Microsoft Windows 98 or later, and Microsoft Outlook 2000 or later.

(http://www.newsgator.com)

xrefer, a supplier of institutional digital reference services, has announced that the new content selection system for xreferplus, its digital reference library, is now available to all subscribers. The new content selection system is designed to allow customers to choose the titles included within their subscription, giving libraries the choice and flexibility to meet their own individual information requirements. Subscribers to xreferplus currently receive access to a set collection of 100 reference books provided by 27 publishing brands. With the release of the new content selection system, xreferplus customers will be able to select the subscription option and content selection that best suits their needs. Two options will initially be offered; xreferplus100 and xreferplus125, which will allow subscribers to select 100 or 125 titles from an expanded content roster. Subscribing institutions can also change their content selections during the duration their subscription, allowing them to take advantage of new xreferplus content offerings and to adapt their subscription to meet evolving information requirements.

(http://www.xrefer.com)

YourAmigo, an enterprise search and retrieval products provider, has reported its first profitable month. They had not expected to deliver a profitable month until the end of 2003. YourAmigo sells enterprise search and search related software products for searching large corporate intranets, ecommerce sites, and Web portals. YourAmigo uses a content discovery technology that allows it to index more data including unlinked documents and dynamically-created pages from databases. These dynamic pages include intranet interface pages, which typically draw data from multiple back-end databases to present the information in a consolidated form. These pages often hold crucial corporate knowledge but can not be indexed (or therefore searched) by traditional search engines. YourAmigo has developed three search-related products: YourAmigo Enterprise Search--for searching all content on a Web site and/or Intranet, including dynamic pages and numerous document formats; YourAmigo Portal Search--for simultaneously searching a number of related Web sites through one portal Web site; YourAmigo Spider Linker--may be installed on a Web site to make all content, including invisible parts, visible to the existing Internet search engine spiders (Google, Alta Vista, FAST, etc.).

(http://www.youramigo.com)

FIZ Karlsruhe, a European information services provider and European partner of STN International, has announced the launch of the PCTGEN database, a new source of nucleotide and amino acid sequence information. Containing sequence and patent application information submitted electronically to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), PCTGEN includes both the nucleotide and peptide sequences themselves, as well as associated bibliographic data as provided by patent applicants. More specifically, records include the following fields: accession number, title, document type, molecule type, patent assignee, patent and application information, organism species, sequence, sequence length, and feature table. Jointly produced by FIZ Karlsruhe and WIPO, PCTGEN currently contains around 1.5 million records from August 2001 to date, including 1.2 million nucleic acid and 0.3 million peptide sequences. STN International can be accessed by dialing directly into STN Classic, the proprietary online service, utilizing the client software STN Express with Discover!; or via STN on the Web using a standard web browser. Both access modes provide searchers with a set of dedicated sequence search tools. Sequence searching in PCTGEN will also be integrated into STN on the Web's Sequence Search Assistant, an interface designed for those unfamiliar with traditional command-line searching.

(http://www.stn-international.de), (http://stnweb.fiz-karlsruhe.de)

Intermarket Group's Content Matrix tracking service has recently looked at paid content services in an effort to track characteristics of the services. An analysis of more than 340 subscription properties/services covered by Intermarket revealed several characteristics among current paid content offerings. Intermarket reports:

--Eighty-one percent of the properties/services tracked continue to offer at least some free content on their Web sites and 61% publish one or more free email newsletters.  Few publishers are placing all of their content behind the subscription barrier.

--Business-oriented properties/services are the most expensive with a median subscription price of $22.45 per month, followed by financial news/information and health-related information. Content categories with the lowest pricing include entertainment ($6.95 per month median price), sports ($5.95), and weather ($4.95).

--Less than one-half (35%) of the properties/services tracked offer free trial subscriptions. Publishers targeting mixed audiences (both consumers and business users) are the most likely to offer free trials while B-to-C publishers are least likely.  Among those properties/services that do offer free trials, the most common length is two weeks.

--One-third (32%) of the properties/services tracked supplement their subscription revenues with single-purchase digital/downloadable content sales, 49% syndicate or license some portion of their digital content, 43% sell related merchandise on their Web sites and 72% include advertising in at least some areas of their Web sites.

--The number of publishers who offer subscription content for wireless devices is increasing, but less than one-in-five support them at present. Fifteen percent of the B-to-B properties/services tracked currently offer content specifically for PDAs or other wireless devices and only 9% of consumer-oriented properties/services offer similarly formatted content.

The Content Matrix tracks more than 340 subscription-based online content properties/services from almost 160 B-to-C and B-to-B publishers, including Ancestry.com, Premiere Radio Networks, RealNetworks, Sportsline.com, WeightWatchers, and Yahoo!. The Matrix is delivered in a Microsoft Excel format enabling users to analyze trends in pricing, free trials, free content, and user registration requirements. Information is also provided on subscription deliverables, including video and audio content; delivery of content by Web, email and for wireless devices; availability of archives; frequency of publication or updating; and sources of revenue.  A companion presentation provides 30+ pages of charts summarizing top-level data from the Matrix itself.

(http://www.intermarketgroup.com)

New research from Jupiter Research, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation, indicates that by 2008, the market opportunity for Web content management will be $2.8 billion. According to Jupiter Research's latest report entitled "Web Content Management: Covering the Essentials, Avoiding Overspending," over-complicated, end-to-end packages can as much as quintuple Web site operational costs over human alternatives.  In fact, 61% of companies who have already deployed Web content management software still rely on manual processes to update their sites. The essentials of Web content management, which Jupiter Research defines as lending structure to content, supporting pre-existing process and separating content from presentation, are not being met cost effectively. The new report, part of the Jupiter Research Content Management Coverage Area, is intended to help companies make the right decisions about buy versus build, vendor selection, and cost-effective implementation. Jupiter Research also advises vendor clients in the content management space on how to effectively target their solutions to best capture the market and its evolving needs.

(http://www.jupitermedia.com)

OneSource Information Services, Inc., a provider of business information solutions, has announced a major enhancement to the OneSource Business Browser product line. The new Find Executives module allows OneSource subscribers to locate and research top prospects, previous champions, past colleagues, or board of director members by searching over 6 million executive names and 250,000 biographies at more than 1.7 million companies. OneSource has also added 50,000 new companies and 90,000 branch and subsidiary executives from the Directory of Corporate Affiliations. Both enhancements are available immediately to OneSource subscribers. Subscribers can now search over 15 sources of executive data, creating targeted lists of executives and colleagues. The new module supports: searches on first and last name; power searching by combinations of name, work functions, work location, industry, education, awards, and interest; and executive board search and identification of cross-board linkages. OneSource has also added 50,000 companies covered by the Directory of Corporate Affiliations (DCA) to the OneSource Business Browser product, bringing the total number of companies available in Global Business Browser, US Edition to 445,000. The DCA content adds 90,000 branch and subsidiary level executives to the 213,000 DCA parent company executives already available through OneSource Business Browser products. DCA company data is integrated with other sources of company and industry data, allowing screening, reporting, and exporting of company contact information, financials, and executive data. The Find Executives module is available in all Business Browser product editions; the Directory of Corporate Affiliations content has been added to all US product editions. These capabilities are included as part of the regular subscription price.  

(http://www.onesource.com)

Vividence has announced a new tool designed to provide insight into how Web site visitors interact with Macromedia Flash content and applications. Many sites have had limited ability to quantify the benefit of building rich content and experiences, however Vividence's new tool is intended to enable companies to measure customers' behavior, thoughts, and attitudes as they interact with Macromedia Flash applications. Research shows that more and more sites use Macromedia Flash for user interactions such as finding information, searching for products, or booking a hotel room. According to NPD, more than 497 million Internet users across all major platforms and devices have Macromedia Flash Player installed. As a result, there has been a growing need to understand how these customers interact with Macromedia Flash applications. Traditional Web tracking tools do not offer a detailed understanding of how users interact with Macromedia Flash, or reveal why users might abandon, become frustrated, or linger on the site. Now, Vividence provides insight into behaviors such as rollovers, clicks, or any other Macromedia Flash action-in the context of real user goals.

(http://www.vividence.com)