cisco

A deadly train crash in California prompts the state's railroad regulators to ban cell phone use by engine operators. Meanwhile, Congress is trying to limit the taxes that can be applied to consumers' cell phone bills. Already state taxes on cell phone plans average 15.19 percent, according to one study, which is twice as much as the average sales tax.

Plus, Cisco buys Jabber, eBay may have put StumbleUpon on the auction block, and a new Apple iPhone-related patent turns up. All this and more on Friday's podcast.

Today's stories:… Read more

Cisco Systems is bolstering its unified communications and collaboration portfolio with the purchase of a corporate instant-messaging company.

On Friday, the networking giant announced it will purchase Jabber, which uses an open-source IM and presence protocol used by Google Talk and Gizmo. The company didn't disclose financial details.

In essence, Jabber's technology allows multiple IM platforms to "talk" to each other. This means that it allows people using tools such as Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, AOL AIM, and Google to send messages to each and get presence information about one another.

Jabber's technology … Read more

Cisco Systems has always been a highly aggressive acquisition machine, and today's announcement that the company has acquired Jabber makes sense in light of the push toward enterprise collaboration that started with the acquisition of WebEx.

While Cisco made no mention of the fact that Jabber was largely open source, I would assume that's because open source is "accepted" at Cisco. A number of products contain open-source components, and despite some GPL issues in the past, Cisco has contributed to open-source projects.

So, is Cisco the company to consolidate open source, or to just consolidate software … Read more

In a sign that open source has truly gone mainstream, Cisco Systems forgot to mention that Jabber is an open-source messaging company when it announced the acquisition of Jabber on Friday.

Indeed, the real news centers around Cisco's growing battle with Microsoft over collaboration, as Larry Dignan points out over at ZDNet. Open source? That's just necessary plumbing, apparently. Indeed, even Jabber hardly mentions open source throughout its Web site, preferring instead to focus on "open standards."

This is appropriate, since Jabber has never been about 100 percent open-source solutions. The company uses open Jabber technologies, … Read more

ST. PAUL, Minn.--Plans for the Republican National Convention taking place here this week have been scaled back somewhat because of Hurricane Gustav, but wiring the convention nevertheless amounts to an impressive technical feat.

The GOP anticipates around 45,000 people arriving for the convention. And to accommodate delegates' cell phones, broadcasters' videocameras, and numerous other gadgets, the party has spent the last 16 months rewiring the Xcel Energy Center from the ground up.

"The good thing about the Xcel Center is it's a very modern building," making the process relatively painless, said Max Everett, RNC chief … Read more

On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I discuss the legal tussle between Apple and the Mac cloner, Psystar.

This week, Psystar sued Apple on antitrust grounds. Psystar execs said they just want to make the Mac OS "more accessible" by offering it on cheaper hardware than what Apple provides. It's hard not to imagine Apple fighting this one to the bitter end and Psystar getting crushed in a lengthy litigation.

Another battle is brewing with Cisco Systems adding e-mail and calendaring to its on-demand, collaborative software platform with the acquisition of PostPath. … Read more

Cisco Systems announced Wednesday plans to acquire e-mail and calendaring software maker PostPath in a $215 million deal.

The acquisition, which is scheduled to close by the end of October, is designed to bolster Cisco's collaboration portfolio by including PostPath's Linux-based e-mail and calendaring software with Cisco's "software as a service" platform.

Cisco's collaborative platform includes instant messaging, voice, video, data, document management, and Web 2.0 applications. PostPath will be folded into Cisco's Collaboration Software Group.

"The acquisition of PostPath complements our strategy to develop an integrated collaboration platform designed for … Read more

It will take more than a whoppingly huge stadium to host tens of thousands of party insiders, journalists, and bloggers who began arriving in Denver this weekend for the Democratic convention.

Even though actual news may be scarce, attendees are nevertheless hauling along laptops, cell phones, wireless cards, and innumerable other gadgets, all of which will place a severe severe strain on the city's communication infrastructure.

To handle the increased demand, the Democrats have enlisted the support of Qwest, Cisco Systems, and other companies to upgrade the technical infrastructure at the Pepsi Center and Invesco Field.

Working with two … Read more

During Tuesday's quarterly earnings call with analysts, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers mentioned in passing that orders of the company's telepresence units were up 500 percent year over year.

Considering the scope of Cisco's $10.4 billion in sales during the second quarter, this qualifies as relative chump change. The list price for the company's typical telepresence configuration is $299,000. Also, there's a difference between the way Cisco books orders and sales.

Tech CEOs tend to lay it on a bit thick when talking up the bright spots in their business, and Chambers naturally … Read more