Motorola Inc has laid off 80 to 100 employees on Monday at its Paging Products Group headquarters in Boynton Beach, due to intense competition and lower prices in the paging industry, the company said: lay offs are also expected at Motorola’s other US paging plant in Fort Worth, but not at its two-way radio manufacturing plant in Plantation, which has been expanding and now has 2,400 employees; the lay-offs in Boynton Beach will take place across the board in spite of reported brisk trade, and rapid expansion in Palm Beach County.
Montreal-based Teleglobe Inc said that its British subsidiary Teleglobe International will carry Bell Cablemedia Plc’s international traffic, but no financial terms were disclosed: Teleglobe said the agreement, which became possible when it got permission to offer international services on a private network between Britain and authorised countries, should generate over 15m minutes of calls annually on its international cable network.
Vodacom (Pty) Ltd, the South African cellular operator in which Vodafone Group Plc is a big investor, will buy 25% of Teljoy Holdings Ltd’s cellular telephone business for $20.5m up front, and a further $1.4m subject to the fulfillment of certain conditions before December 31, the companies said: Teljoy’s cellular division will be transferred into a separate entity, called Teljoy Cellular Services (Pty) Ltd.
Supplier of integrated test, measurement, and diagnostics for electronic products GenRad Inc said it has resolved all legal issues and settled a litigation over Hewlett-Packard Co’s patent claims for electrical detection devices of open circuits on circuit boards and GenRad distributors’ related products: the companies agreed to grant each other a worldwide non-exclusive cross-licence under all patent claims directed only to electrical detection of open circuits on circuit boards; GenRad said this will not affect its finances as it made reserves for legal fees and costs.
Unisys UK Ltd has been lining up a decision support software portfolio for its Opus Parallel Unisys Server, and has entered into partnerships with Business Objects SA, DM/Backup Software Ltd, Gupta Corp, Information Builders Inc, Legent Corp, Pioneer Systems Inc, Prism Software Inc, Powersoft Corp, TechGnosis Inc, TeamQuest Corp, Red Brick Systems Inc and Oracle Corp; future partnerships – including one with data mining specialist Information Discovery Inc of Torrance, California for the IDIS product – are expected to be signed shortly.
Dallas, Texas-based AirTouch Communications Inc will buy Message Center Beepers, a paging company with more than 280,000 customers, primarily in the North Eastern United States: no financial details were given, but the company said the acquisition, which will give it some 2m units in 25 states, should complete by first quarter of 1996.
Fiserv Inc, Milwaukee, Wisconsin provider of financial data processing systems and information management services, is to buy the Document Management Services division of Alltel Information Services Inc, formerly Systematics Information Services Inc: Document Management, a third-party cheque processing provider to the financial industry, has item processing facilities in California and New Jersey; terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Fremont, California-based Media Vision Technology Inc reports that Creative Technology Ltd filed a lawsuit claiming Media Vision had breached a 1992 agreement to settle previous litigation: the suit seeks to stop it selling SoundBlaster-compatible products and seeks any revenues to Media Vision from the sale of such products – the company terminated its licensing agreement with Creative Technology in March, saying it has its own proprietary SoundBlaster-compatible technology, and did not believe termination of the agreement would affect its right to sell its current products.
Semiconductor packaging company Microelectronic Packaging Inc says it needs significant additional resources to keep operating and has been s
eeking extra capital from a variety of sources: the company reported a second quarter loss of $1.83m, on turnover of $13.2m and blamed the weakening US dollar against the Japanese yen and Singapore dollar; it also warned of extra costs stemming from its planned sale of its multi-layered ceramics unit, MPM (S) Pte Ltd in Singapore, valued at $2.5m, which requires approval from IBM Corp for the transfer of licensing rights.
McAfee Associates Inc said its software anti-virus program VirusScan for Windows95 was shipped to retail outlets on August 21, at an estimated street price of $45: Windows 95 is clearly a prime target for virus writers, the firm said.
Distributor and retailer of computer products and services Inacom Corp is building a $6.5m, 180,000 square foot distribution and custom configuration facility next to Ontario airport: currently in temporary premises, Inacom expects the new building to open by May 1996.
The Open Document Architecture Consortium has a contract from the European Commission to work on various document interchange projects.
We thought at first that the flash on the front of the Independent on Monday describing Windows95 as the world’s most powerful computer system must have been a disguised advertisement, then we remembered that under the rules of the UK Advertising Standards Authority, all advertisements have to be legal, honest, decent and truthful…
