Responding to a newspaper report, Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Philips Electronics NV says it has no plans to make a near-term announcement about closer relations with its 41%-owned software and services company BSO Beheer NV, which trades as Origin outside the Netherlands (CI No 2,701): the Wall Street Journal reported a Philips unit was planning to buy a controlling stake in BSO, saying the parties were in talks and a deal was expected within the month; We’re constantly talking to see whether we can co-operate in other fields and expand existing co-operations, said Philips But there’s nothing we would want to announce today, tomorrow or the day after, the company added.

The Belgian government announced a shortlist of three groups in the bidding for a minority stake in Belgacom NV: they are British Telecommunications Plc with Bell Atlantic Corp, Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV with Swiss Telecom; and Ameritech Inc; too slow to the three chairs when the music stopped was Stet SpA, dropped as it did not have enough industrial synergies to consolidate Belgacom’s future; talks with Ameritech will continue only if the US company provides a price within the range set by Belgium’s privatisation commission.

Revisiting territory they have not seen since 1992, IBM Corp shares broke back up through the $100 mark Friday, rising $1.50 to $100.375.

The Start travel distribution system with 28,400 terminals in 14,000 travel agencies, equally owned by Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the German railway Deutsche Bahn AG, and the TUI travel group is to form a strategic alliance with the Amadeus airline reservation system to improve their service, develop new products and cut costs, Start said.

British Telecommunications Plc and MCI Communications Corp extended the use of their private voice service to Spain, Italy and Switzerland: they say that since launch last July the service has won over 35 contracts worth more than ú65m; the service enables customers to call multi-lingual customer service centres 24 hours a day, seven days a week and be billed in a choice of 20 currencies and nine languages.

Harris Computer Systems Corp warns that it expects to post a third-quarter loss of about $3.00 to $3.25 per share following the delay of $5m to $6m of orders originally expected to come in in the period.

Natick, Massachusetts-based machine vision systems specialist Cognex Corp is finally on its way with a technology that has been slow to get off the ground: the company said on Friday that it expects to increase its staff by about 20% or 50 employees, in coming months as it expands; it has bought an 83,000 square foot office building adjacent to its corporate headquarters in Natick, for $5.3m in cash and has also begun work on a proposed 50,000 square foot addition to its headquarters building, and the extra space will be enough to accomodate up to 1,000 staff; it has 250 worldwide now, about 200 in Natick.

LSI Logic Corp says more than 9m shares of its Canadian unit were tendered by Thursday, allowing it to go ahead with its acquisition of the rest of the subsidiary: it is extending its tender offer until July 24 as it seeks to acquire the remaining 2m shares of LSI Canada.

Keeping up the unreality, shares in Legato Systems Inc, sold at $19 in its initial public offering soared $9 to $28 late in the morning of the first day’s trading.

Nynex Corp is claiming that the thing was a success, and it has run for 18 months, but the phone company has told the US Federal Communications Commission that it is concluding its trial of video dial-tone services in Manhattan: it says it expects technology supporting a new, more advanced trial of digital video services to be available next year and plans to begin testing a system to deliver digital video services to high-rise apartment buildings in New York City when the technology is available; it reckons the trial, begun in January 1994, was one of the first successful field tests of interactive video-on-demand services done in t

he US.

Akai Electric Co Ltd plans to cut its workforce by about 40% to some 670 by the end of this fiscal to November 30, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported: under its early retirement plan, the audio equipment maker plans to cut about 400 employees from the 1,070 working at its headquarters in Tokyo and two factories in the cities of Yokohama and Gyoda, the Japanese newspaper said.

IBM Corp says customers who have or who plan to buy PowerPC 601-based symmetric RS/6000s will get free 604 upgrades, at least until purpose-built 604 multiprocessors ship.

There’s gloom deep in the heart of Texas with the instigators of three major new semiconductor all settling on Oregon rather than Texas – LSI Logic Corp with a $600m plant, Hyundai Electronics Co, a $1,300m plant, and Sumitomo Sitix Corp, with $900m to spend, so the Lone Star State is pulling out all the stops to make sure that the likely last such project for some time, Samsung Electronics Co’s plans for a $1,300m new plant that promises to employ at least 1,200 people, does not slip from its grasp as well, the Wall Street Journal reported: Samsung has narrowed its choices to Austin and Portland; attractions of Oregon include its relative proximity to Silicon Valley and the fact that it is much nearer by air to Asia than Texas – but Oregon also has a more business-friendly environment with the incentive that state counties can cap the taxable property value of new factories at $100m for 15 year s if in return, depending on the size of the plant, companies pay up to $2m of their tax savings over those years to help pay for repairs to schools and streets in the state; in the case of Samsung, Austin won’t offer the pure financial inducements held out by Portland, but the South Korean listed its desire for a trained work force as its top priority in picking a location, and Austin has agreed for the next 10 years to invest 20% of the property taxes Samsung pays to train workers in the skills that the firm needs.

Embarrassing – a key feature of the Compagnie des Machines Bull SA investment in Packard Bell Electronics Inc was to add a notebook computer dimension from Bull’s Zenith Data Systems to Packard Bell’s product line, but now Packard Bell is saying that its alliance with NEC Corp is inter alia intended to get it into portables, suggesting that the Zenith Data alliance has delivered rather less than it promised.

Transarc Corp is promises a new Encina release in a couple of months.

An investigation of personal computer manufacturers’ telephone help lines by the Wall Street Journal turns up a ripe crop of horror stories, the best one being told by Greg Falzon, a researcher for Computer Intelligence InfoCorp, who tells of noticing that a desktop computer in his La Jolla, California office appeared to be turned off: as he pushed the button to turn it on, a colleague screamed at him to keep his finger on the button because the computer was in the middle of an hours-long task that left the screen blank; fellow researcher Dan Ness called Wall Data Inc to see if Mr Falzon could remove his finger without the program crashing and they told him We’ll get back to you in 72 hours…