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The two largest phone companies in Canada are in talks for a possible merger that could fend off U.S.-backed private equity buyers as the wave of consolidation that reshaped the U.S. telecommunications landscape appears poised to hit north of the border. BCE, the largest phone provider in Canada, confirmed Thursday that it was in talks with the country’s No. 2 firm Telus about a transaction in which Telus would buy BCE. BCE did not disclose terms of the proposed deal.

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Regulators in Europe have given the green light to a planned Internet joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.: a Web video repository seen as a competitor to Google’s YouTube. The yet-to-be-named venture — first announced in March following weeks of speculation — is expected to launch sometime this summer and, at least at first, will be an outlet mainly for video content from the two media companies. European Commission regulators had been reviewing the proposed plan for possible antitrust issues since shortly after it was announced.

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Earlier this month, it looked for a while as though there might be another wave of multi-jurisdictional investigations against Microsoft reminiscent of the antitrust saga that began in 1998. Google had been complaining — first behind the scenes, then publicly — about the lack of access for third-party search engines in Microsoft’s latest operating system, Vista. Antitrust authorities on the state level were starting to sniff around. On Wednesday, though, Microsoft announced it would make changes to Vista that would satisfy Google’s concerns.

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It goes without saying that most IT shops operate in a high-stress, high-workload environment. As technologists, we have limited budgets, limited staff, and dozens of projects on our plate — it often feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day just to keep up with today’s workload, never mind planning for tomorrow’s. Just ask yourself when the last time was that you heard someone complain about too much work or not enough time. For most of us, the answer to that will be measured in hours rather than days or weeks.

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Have you ever walked into a big box store and seen scores of half-full shopping carts scattered throughout the aisles? It would seem unlikely, but for e-commerce retailers, abandoned carts are more common than you think. Shopping cart abandonment has existed since the dawn of the e-cart, but how can retailers determine why customers leave? What can they do to reduce shopping cart abandonment and ultimately increase online sales? Customers leave for various reasons, the most common being high shipping costs and requests for registration.

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WSO2 has entered the open source SOA field with a slate of veterans from Web services specifications, application server design and lightweight framework development. The company’s latest offering to the market came June 11 with the arrival of WSO2 ESB 1.0, based on Apache Synapse and targeted at both developers who want to use enterprise service buses quickly, as well as operations architects seeking lightweight and high-performing components.

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This past May, the country of Estonia was hit hard by what its authorities called a “virtual war.” This war took the form of an attack on the country’s computer infrastructure. Many governmental and commercial sites were hit. The attacks on the country’s commerce seemed to focus on the country’s media — television stations and newspapers. Additionally, other commercial sites were hit, such as banking institutions. Estonia is probably one of the most computer literate countries in the world.

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If you have a super brand, then let the whole world see it. If you have absolute 100 percent global ownership of that brand, then prove it. A quick search on Google will get you started. Many of today’s best-known brands may still be threatened by a lack of exclusivity. They may have logos, unique designs, colorful executions, banners and billboards, but as long as there are similar and identical name brands in the marketplace, they do not have 100 percent ownership.

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EU regulators said they would expand their ongoing probe into the privacy issues first raised about search engine giant Google to include other major search tools. The decision of the European Commission’s data watchdog group to broaden its probe into the privacy implications of rapidly evolving search technologies means Google will have to wait longer to find out whether it will face any sanctions from European regulators. The group will “deal with search engines in general, and scrutinize their activities from a data protection point of view,” it said.

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The Pentagon took an undisclosed number of computers offline on Wednesday after it detected a cyber-attack on its systems earlier this week, Pentagon spokesperson Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler told the E-Commerce Times. This resulted in some of the Pentagon’s e-mail systems being taken down. Peppler declined to say how many computers were affected, but he also added that he’s “not disputing” widely circulated reports that the number was in the vicinity of 1,500. He declined to offer any details about the attack, or to estimate when the computers might be brought online again.

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