read more »

Avaya, the publically traded enterprise telecommunications technology company spun out of Lucent barely six years ago, is going private.

The deal's a big one for the industry: $8 billion - and a decent deal for investors - $17.50 per share.  read more »

Nuance Communications announced the acquisition of long time rival VoiceSignal today, giving the speech juggernaut a lock on device based speech recognition.  read more »

Google has quietly entered the mobile search market with the stealth launch of 1-800-GOOG-411. This completely automated service allows a user to find a business listing and be connected for free, even offering SMS of results back when calling from a mobile phone.

This experimental service offers the following:  read more »

UPDATE: Microsoft has announced the acquisition this morning (March 14). 

The Wall Street Journal refreshed the rumor mill today that Microsoft was once again approaching TellMe. This iteration of the rumor mill puts an $800 million price tag on TellMe's book of business.  read more »

The Department of Homeland Security posted its guidelines for the implementation of Real ID. Real ID is a set of standards for drivers licences and state ID cards proposed by the Federal Government that:  read more »

Today, on the second day of the SpeechTek conference, Nuance announced its acquisition of BeVocal (see press release here).

Though some see this acquisition as a big thumbs up from the speech recognition juggernaut, I see another finger being raised to its existing hosting partners.  read more »

AOL's recent move to embrace OpenID (right behind Microsoft and the rest of world+dog) has taken the next step, with all AOL and AIM screen names becoming an OpenID URL.

With this, in one fell swoop, over 63 million new OpenID accounts have just been created.  read more »

On February 6, at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Andy Rolfe of Authentify and Dr. Stephen Elliot of Purdue University presented the results of a study on Authentify's implementation of voice biometrics/speaker verification. It should be noted that this study should not be considered to be a statement on voice biometrics on the whole, but on a specific implementation of a a single vendor's hosted authentication solution.  read more »

OpenID, the most visible of the new identity management schemas - and CardSpace, Microsoft's browser based initiative to help users control and protect their identity online have decided to play nicely together in the User-Centric Identity space. The press release is here .

A team consisting of Microsoft, VeriSign, Sxip and JanRain has been assembled to implement the new interoperability model.  read more »