In Brief

Jersey City, NJ-based CheckFree Investment Services announced that over 700,000 portfolios are maintained on its CheckFree APL and CheckFree APL WRAP systems. CheckFree provides outsourcing of automated investment management, trading, portfolio performance and accounting systems for money managers and financial advisors. The amount of assets managed in CheckFree's client base has reached more than $400 billion between the APL and APL WRAP systems. CheckFree has also signed an agreement with BlackBook Software, a provider of relationship management and billing applications. CheckFree will offer the integration of BlackBook's desktop applications for marketing and prospecting to high net-worth investment managers using its APL system. BlackBook's software is written in Visual Basic and uses a Microsoft SQL or Microsoft Access data base which will complement INFODEX, APL's contact management system.

Princeton Financial Systems has joined the Application Service Provider (ASP) Industry Consortium, which currently has more than 130 firm members. The consortium was launched last May to sponsor research, develop standard and provide information to the marketplace on the ASP software industry. Princeton Financial, an independent subsidiary of State Street Bank, provides portfolio accounting and management systems through it's PAM series of products. Princeton has also begun offering an ASP option called PAMConnect for institutional investors to use the PAM applications on an outsourced basis.

Time Warner's CNN has refused to allow Smallcapcenter.com, an Internet financial news service from Stockgroup.com, to advertise on its channel or its affiliates CNNfn and CNN Headline News. CNN says a new policy in place denies advertising to companies determined to be competitors. Other financial new services are planning to run the advertisements, which were scheduled to begin airing this week. Smallcapcenter.com was the first company that CNN has exercised the new rule with.

Hewlett-Packard has chosen to use Open Text Corporation's flagship product Livelink in its Consulting Division. The collaborative knowledge management system enables users to share and leverage corporate knowledge from around the world. Livelink servers are Web-based with an open architecture for team collaboration, enterprise group scheduling and information retrieval.