Communication Intelligence Corporation (CIC) has announced a new licensing agreement with First American Bank which has integrated and begun deployment of CIC's Sign-it biometric electronic signature software for in-branch software applications.

Palm today lowered the price of the Palm VIIx to US$199. Subtract the US$100 rebate when you purchase a year of service at US$24.99, and the price of the unit is US$99. Service plans are US$9.99, US$24.99, and US$44.99 per month. The rebate is good until the end of the year.

Conduits Technologies has announced the release of Timekeeper 1.0 for Pocket PC (US$10) -- this stopwatch and countdown time is highly configurable, and also supports customized skins for personalization.

Handheld Computing Magazine has awarded "Best Products of 2000 Awards" to Blue Nomad's WordSmith (word processing tool) for Palm OS and BackupBuddy (feature rich backup utility) for Palm OS.

The U.S. Army Military Police (MP) program out of U.S. Army Natick Soldier Center in Natick, MA has recently demonstrated at "Force Protection Equipment Demonstration (FPED III)" the Visionics' FaceIt facial recognition technology running on a ViA's next generation, Transmeta-based wearable computer.

MobiMate has announced the release of PhoneMate v1.5 for Palm OS that has been designed to help users quickly find phone numbers and dial the found phone numbers using "one-hand" operations.

Bachmann Software has announced plans to make their PrintBoy software for Palm OS compatible with Zebra Technologies line of mobile printers (Encore, Cameo, and PA/PT-400).

-Steve Holden (sholden@pencomputing.com)