News Briefs

Arch Communications Group Inc. said it will offer weather updates to paging customers through a strategic marketing relationship with The Weather Channel’s weather.com Internet site. The weather.com site offers a Wireless Weather service to customers using a text-enabled messaging device. The agreement is its first co-branded agreement with a specific carrier, the company said.

Starsem successfully launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan four more satellites of the Globalstar constellation, the company announced. Including this launch, 48 Globalstar satellites are in orbit, half of which were launched by Starsem in less than 10 months. Starsem, which partners with Aerospatiale, Arianespace, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency and the Samara Space Center, handles the marketing and operates the commercial launch services for the Soyuz family of launchers, the company said.

U.S. Wireless Corp. said it established the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore metro market as the first major section of its national wireless location network, which will provide wireless carriers with real-time data to meet the Federal Communications Commission’s mandate for enhanced 911 caller location. The network also gives wireless carriers, Internet portals, broadcast media and others the ability to offer roadside assistance, traffic updates and personal location services, among others, the company said.

The Open Group, a vendor and technology neutral consortium dedicated to enterprise integration, announced an agreement to serve as the certification authority for the Wireless Application Protocol Forum’s standard. For certification testing, The Open Group developed a test suite specification to ensure wireless vendors’ products are compliant with the WAP V1.1 specification. The test suite measures conformance to the Wireless Markup Language application layer specifications, as well as WMLscript and WMLscript libraries, said The Open Group. The certification test uses a WML server that delivers tests that run on the devices or phones, and performs a functionality and interoperability test at the application level.

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