Hilton Hotels

Imagine that a company set up a mall store where, instead of selling trinkets, it sold information about customers' behavior. For a few cents, it could tell a saleswoman at one shop that the person who was about to walk in had already stopped at a competitor and was looking for red shoes.

That is the idea behind two new Internet companies, BlueKai and eXelate Media. They do not sell products or ad space but information about Web site visitors.

Microsoft announced Wednesday that the 2008 version of SQL Server, its data-management and business-intelligence platform, has been released to manufacturing.

The company said new capabilities have been added, such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis. Microsoft is also touting its support for aggregation, summarization, search engines, dashboards, transactions across distributed data sources, and long-running transactions.

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