Microsoft has purchased some "cutting edge" digital audio technology from Interactive Objects that will enable Microsoft to deliver Microsoft's Windows Streaming Media file formats to devices running Windows CE. [SOURCE: InfoWorld, PC World Online]

Xerox has announced a new suite of "knowledge-management systems and services" that will include technology called "Xerox MobileDoc" which has been designed to enable mobile users to connect back to their companies "knowledgebases" from thin clients like smart phones, two-way pagers, and handheld computers. [SOURCE: Beth Davis, Information Week]

3Com's CEO Eric Benhaou has been quoted by industry sources as "expecting" a higher growth rate for Palm OS related revenues given 3Com's new initiatives to widely license Palm OS to other companies. 3Com is also projecting to ship 14 million Palm OS devices by the year 2002--they sold one million devices in the first two years of availability. [SOURCES: AFX, Newsbytes]

Enfour has announced the "imminent" release of "UniFEP (Unicode Front End Processor) for EPOC32"--an input and display system for Unicode characters on the Psion Series 5 and other EPOC32 devices.

PC World Online has a pointer to a new Palm OS alarm utility package called "Alarm Hack" that lets you "modify the date book alarm ring," and "tweak the alarm alert so you can easily dismiss the dialog by touching anywhere on the screen."

Puma Technology has announced plans to partner with Japan's DDI (cellular carrier) to provide "mobile device management and synchronization software" to DDI's growing list of smartphone users.

Sean Luke has announced the freeware release of Radicals (Chinese character input system) and CharDict+ (dictionary of 4000 Chinese characters) for the Newton at his website.

The Stanford PalmPilot User Group (SPUG) meets at 7pm on the first Tuesday of each month--the next meeting will be on 04May99. The Guest of Honor will be Steve Sabram, President of Datastick Systems, demoing their data acquisition hardware. The location of the meeting: Printer's Inc. Bookstore Cafe, 310 California Ave, Palo Alto, California.

Olympus has a new digital voice recorder called the "DS-150" (US$199) that can hold up to 160 minutes of speech, and ships with a desktop PC version of IBM ViaVoice to help in the transfer of voice message to text. [SOURCE: PC World]

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)