AT&T Corp is planning a big move to win back local telephone service from the Baby Bells, the Wall Street Journal reported, suggesting that AT&T could spin off one or more of the its business units – and that includes the former NCR Corp, sources told the paper, also nominating the AT&T Network Systems equipment business, which the company could take public, and its Universal credit card division.
Time Warner Inc is now said to be considering supporting a bid by Turner Broadcasting System Inc for CBS Inc, the New York Times reported, saying support would be tied to Turner’s buying back Time Warner’s nearly 205 stake in Turner – but Microsoft Corp emphatically ruled out taking a stake in Turner, saying There’s nothing to it – there’s a lot of speculation with no basis in fact, the firm said.
Pearson Plc might pull out of Europe Online in order to make room for German publisher Axel Springer Verlag AG, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel said, which said that Springer will this week finally announce its intention to invest in the new on-line service; Europe Online, with headquarters in Luxembourg, is owned by Burda AG, Pearson, Matra-Hachette SA, AT&T Corp, former German post minister Christian Schwarz-Schilling and US company Meigher Communications Inc; it is expectes to become commercially available in Germany, France, the UK and the Benelux later this year.
Meantime Bertelsmann AG and America Online Inc have expanded the initial field trials of their new on-line service in Germany beyond Hamburg to include the cities of Munich and Berlin with 28.8Kbps nodes put in.
Camelot Corp, Dallas is now manufacturing its Digiphone Internet software program, and has renamed the original product Digiphone Deluxe so the original name can be attached to a low-end product that costs $90 and offers full duplex speech telephony over the Internet only where the Deluxe adds a Web Browser, File Transfer Protocol, Telnet and electronic mail at $150.
Microsoft Corp is building on its Visual Basic language to forge links between its operating systems and the World Wide Web, Electrical Engineering Times reports: the language would, for example, enable end users to create macros that could function as software agents, automatically scouring the Internet for desired documents and data.
Warning to all China gold-diggers – Matsushita Electric Industrial Co’s investment in China is likely to slow down because a change in the country’s stance toward foreign investment means it has become more selective, restrictive and, in some areas, prohibitive, the company said: Matsushita first set up a Chinese joint venture for colour television cathode ray tubes in 1987, apparently buoyed by a close relationship between the founder Konosuke Matsushita and Deng Xiaoping, and currently has $513m invested in 23 joint ventures and subsidiaries, mostly engaged in the production of consumer electric appliances; it said China has become more restrictive where its own companies had mastered the technology in question, or where companies already achieve sufficient production capacities, although foreign investment overall has increased 11.28% this year to $16,370m according to China’s Xinhua news agency.
VeriFone Inc said it plans to buy Enterprise Integration Technologies, a provider of Internet software and consulting services, paying about $28m in new shares: the company expects one-off acquisition charges of between $700,000 and $900,000 after November completion.
Digital Equipment Corp is replacing its existing Celebris corporate desktop line with the new Celebris GL family of high performance personal computers with enhanced audio, video and networking features and will offer several new Pentium-based models in its Starion line: prices for the Celebris GL line, available in 90MHz, 100MHz, 122MHz and 133MHz versions, range from $2,800 to $4,300 and start at $1,750 for the Starion line; both will be available for August 24.
The US Federal Communications Commission says that for t
he first time ever, it will have cut staff by about 10% in face of budget cuts, even though the pending telecommunications legislation mean that it will likely have to hire new staff.
Adobe Systems Inc confirmed to the San Jose Mercury News that it is in negotiations to lease several – and perhaps all – of the five vacant floors left in the newly-opened downtown San Jose office tower originally built for IBM Corp, which would leave IBM with just three floors in the Almaden Boulevard building that was erected with a $17m Redevelopment Agency subsidy.
IBM Corp’s Argentine unit is under investigation for irregular payments tied to a $250m contract to modernise computer systems at the country’s largest bank, state-owned Banco de la Nacion Argentina, the Wall Street Journal reports: judicial investigators have alleged IBM Argentina SA paid $14m of the contract value to a shell company called Capacitacion y Computacion Rural SA, which in turn paid nearly $6m to phantom firms, in what is either to be part of a tax-evasion scheme or bribes to government officials, although no charges have been filed and Banco Nacion officials have denied breaking any laws; IBM has also denied any illegalities, but said it will conduct internal investigations into its Argentine affairs; an Argentine state official accused of controlling one of the linked firms, has resigned.
Nokia Oy’s Nokia Telecommunications’ Network and Access Systems Division is opening a research and development laboratory in Boston in January to work on Asynchronous Transfer Mode product development.
A cable theft in the Dianabad quarter of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, left 18 apartment blocks without telephones, Bulgarian State Radio said: telephones with first digits between 62 and 68 will be cut off until August 25 according to the Bulgarian Telecommunications Co, bemoaning the fact that the phone company has suffered huge losses caused by massive thefts of cables, which thieves find fetch a high price when sold for scrap.
London Evening Standard editor Stewart Steven, in the stocks for publishing under the name of former Labour luminary a feature criticising Britain’s Labour Party and actually written by Nick Howard, begins to look a little accident-prone, because he was duty editor back in 1977 on the notorious night when the Daily Mail unwittingly published a forged letter purportedly written by Lord Ryder, chairman of the National Enterprise Board, to Alex Park, British Leyland’s chief executive appearing, to encourage Park to pay bribes to win overseas orders, implying that the fund had been nodded through by Labour’s industry minister – but in the present case, Bryan Gould disappoints us – there we were being told that the New Model Labour Party is red hot for the Internet and that only the sons of Tory Home Secretaries still use the very unsatisfactory interim technology of facsimile, which usually comes through mangled and loses its cover sheet, and needs some poor sap to key the stuff all over again – yet instead of using trendy New Labourish electronic mail, Gould goes and uses fax… but then Bryan Gould is not too enamoured of New Labour…
