Groove slashes 20% of payroll

•   Groove Networks laid off 20% of its workforce last week and also announced that it had closed a fifth round of financing worth $38 million from investors that include Accel Partners, Intel Capital and Microsoft. The company now has raised more than $155 million since its founding in October 1997. Groove says the elimination of 58 positions represents the completion of a restructuring of its sales, marketing and services organizations. The company says the move reflects the Fortune 500 companies' slowdown in software spending. Groove shipped its first product in April 2001 and released Version 2.5 of Groove Workspace this month.

•  Underscoring growing concern over spam, the Internet Engineering Task Force has created an Anti-Spam Research Group that aims to put unsolicited commercial e-mail in its cross hairs by setting standards for spam detection and potential legislation. The antispam group will work within the organization's Internet Research Task Force and will investigate whether a single architecture can be implemented that will let e-mail receivers express their consent and, more importantly, lack of consent for certain communications. This approach is because everyone's definition of spam is different, the group said, making e-mail a consent-based communication. The antispam group wants to develop an architecture with three components: consent expression, consent enforcement and source tracking. The ASRG will hold its first meeting March 20 in San Francisco.

•  The General Services Administration and U.S. Department of Defense last week became the latest members to join the Liberty Alliance, a group working to create a standards-based specification for federated user identity. The group, which now has 160 members, also added to its membership rolls Lockheed Martin, the largest provider of IT services, systems integration and training to the U.S. government. The government is said to be interested in exploring how the Liberty Alliance specifications can help government organizations authenticate the identity of users that do business with government groups over the Internet. The alliance is expected to announce Version 2.0 of its specification this summer.

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•   Groove Networks laid off 20% of its workforce last week and also announced that it had closed a fifth round of financing worth $38 million from investors that include Accel Partners, Intel Capital and Microsoft. The company now has raised more than $155 million since its founding in October 1997. Groove says the elimination of 58 positions represents the completion of a restructuring of its sales, marketing and services organizations. The company says the move reflects the Fortune 500 companies' slowdown in software spending. Groove shipped its first product in April 2001 and released Version 2.5 of Groove Workspace this month.

•  Underscoring growing concern over spam, the Internet Engineering Task Force has created an Anti-Spam Research Group that aims to put unsolicited commercial e-mail in its cross hairs by setting standards for spam detection and potential legislation. The antispam group will work within the organization's Internet Research Task Force and will investigate whether a single architecture can be implemented that will let e-mail receivers express their consent and, more importantly, lack of consent for certain communications. This approach is because everyone's definition of spam is different, the group said, making e-mail a consent-based communication. The antispam group wants to develop an architecture with three components: consent expression, consent enforcement and source tracking. The ASRG will hold its first meeting March 20 in San Francisco.

•  The General Services Administration and U.S. Department of Defense last week became the latest members to join the Liberty Alliance, a group working to create a standards-based specification for federated user identity. The group, which now has 160 members, also added to its membership rolls Lockheed Martin, the largest provider of IT services, systems integration and training to the U.S. government. The government is said to be interested in exploring how the Liberty Alliance specifications can help government organizations authenticate the identity of users that do business with government groups over the Internet. The alliance is expected to announce Version 2.0 of its specification this summer.

•  Much of the CRM software that companies buy ends up unused, according to data Gartner released last week. The research firm found that 42% of CRM software licenses respondents bought were not deployed. Despite tight expense controls, companies have been buying more CRM software licenses than they can use, Gartner says. While that might seem to make sense in the short term, in the long term it costs companies more - a 20% to 30% increase in total cost of ownership, compared with companies that carefully plan their CRM software license purchases, Gartner says.

•  A team of scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center says it has set an Internet speed record using fiber-optic cables to send 6.7G bytes of data - the equivalent of two DVD movies - across 6,800 miles in only 58 seconds. The transfer of uncompressed data occurred at 923M bit/sec from Sunnyvale, Calif., to Amsterdam. That's about 3,500 times faster than a typical Internet broadband connection. "By exploring the edges of Internet technologies' performance envelope, we are improving our . . . ability to implement new networking technologies," researcher Les Cottrell told CNN. The experiment could "bring high-speed data transfer to practical, everyday applications, such as doctors at multiple sites sharing and discussing a patient's [heart test results] to diagnose and plan treatment," Cottrell says.