Morning Edition 15.09.00

silicon.com's two-minute guide to the best ebusiness and IT stories from this morning's UK national newspapers.

Baltimore Technologies, darling of the stock market and hero of the beleaguered European high-tech sector, is in the news again. Playing catch-up to silicon.com (again?), the Financial Times details Baltimore's £692m acquisition of Content Technologies. For its money, Baltimore gets hold of Mimesweeper, the email security product used by six million users. The story comes with obligatory research data to underline what a shrewd purchase this is. According to IDC, the content security market will by worth $952m by 2004. For our take on the story, see http://www.silicon.com/a39751 ... As if to prove security is the business to be in, the Guardian runs a report from website certification site, Clicksure. According to the figures, 70 per cent of Europe's top healthcare companies keep users' personal data in a potentially insecure environment... While Baltimore's star continues to rise - despite the odd-high level departure (see Wednesday's Morning Edition) - other European technology firms are coming under fire for failing to invest in R&D. The Guardian pre-empts a Department of Trade and Industry report due out later today. The report claims that spend on research and development is on average half that of US firms. Companies who do invest in R&D are 75 per cent more likely to achieve sales, the paper concludes... Back in the world of the regulators, the European Commission is likely to find its decision to block the $115bn acquisition of Sprint by Worldcom under challenge. According to The Times, the US telecoms group has two weeks to file an appeal with the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. The paper quotes a Worldcom advisor putting the chances of an appeal at "significantly more than 50-50..." Finally, taxi passengers in New York can now surf the web for free while they crawl through Manhattan's avenues thanks to Yahoo! The Telegraph says the search engine company is trialling just ten web cabs but if it proves successful, a permanent programme on more of New York's 12,000 yellow cabs could follow. A New York cab averages 30 fares and 141 miles each day. That's a lot of surfing... Morning Edition will be back on Monday.