The AT&T Corp to buy Cabletron Systems Inc buzz that first went round last September (CI No 2,491) has resurfaced in the PC Week gossip column: AT&T already buys hubs from Cabletron, which denies whenever asked that acquisition is in the wind, but US trade weekly hears of a memo going out at Cabletron instructing employees not to compete with AT&T for any business.
MobileOne (Asia) Pte Ltd has won the licence to operate the second cellular phone service in Singapore, Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd and Cable & Wireless Plc, which own 30% of MobileOne through their Great Eastern Telecommunications Ltd; other investors are Singapore Press Holdings Ltd, 35% and the Keppel Group, 30%; the venture was also awarded a licence to operate a radio paging service in Singapore.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc, already working with Hewlett-Packard Co on microprocessors for handheld computers, has now won Hewlett as a customer for the Am486 microprocessors for desktop personal computers: the move is despite Hewlett-Packed being ascloseasthis to Intel Corp after its agreement for joint development of successors to the P6 – but Intel can’t really complain anyway because it is phasing out fabrication of its own 80486 parts.
French telecommunications equipnment company Philips TRT SA, 99% owned by Philips Electronics NV, plans to shed 153 jobs out of a total of 1,244, at its Plessis-Robinson site near Paris, said the unions representing its employees.
A T Kearney spurned that bid, put at $519m, from Electronic Data Systems Corp, the Wall Street Journal was told: the consultants that own Kearney unanimously rejected the offer, which averaged out at $4m for each of the 130 shareholders.
NEC Corp’s NEC Technologies unit cut prices up to 18% on its Image high-end personal computer family.
Tulip Computers NV says its new $4m production line is expected to be in operation by August: its second line, it adds capacity for 250,000 circuit boards a year, and is needed because of the strong rise in demand for Tulip computers.
Who will supply the set-top boxes for the Westminster Cable Ltd trial (CI No 2,658)? The answer is that procurement has been subcontracted to Digital Equipment Corp, and the company has not chosen a box yet.
The chairman of RWE AG finally confirmed that the electricity generator is in talks with AT&T Corp as a possible partner for its fledgling telecommunications operations: We are talking to many foreign partners, including AT&T, he told the Associated Press-Dow Jones World Equities Report; its alliance with smaller generators announced earlier this year gives it access to a network covering 65% of Germany’s land area and within reach of 75% of potential business users; it is also co-operation talks with Veba AG and Viag AG, each of which has chosen a British partner for its planned telecommunications arm.
Falling sales of electronic typewriters and word processors, Smith Corona Corp is cutting 750 jobs, 25% of its workforce: the company made a $12.1m loss for its most recent quarter (the figures are in page seven) and suspended its dividend: it is also transferring typewriter manufacturing to Mexico from its facilities in Singapore and Batam, Indonesia to reduce costs.
IBM Corp has two new ThinkPad portable computers, one of which can be used as an overhead projector when a panel in the lid is removed so that light can be shone through the liquid crystal diode display: IBM says the innovation, designed by its Almaden, California laboratory, will eliminate the need for overhead projection panels used for computerised presentations; the machine, which weighs 6 lbs 10 oz and starts at $6,800, also includes an infra-red system for remote control of presentations; the other model, a Pentium-based 6 lbs 2 oz unit at from $6,500, is the first ThinkPad with a Super VGA colour screen and a Lithium ion battery.
Sage Group Plc shares are still rising on the backwash of its better-than-expected interims, and added another 10p to
955p yesterday.
Apple Computer Inc and IBM Corp announced their OpenDoc plans at the annual Apple Worldwide Developer Conference: they will offer OpenDoc tools under with Mac OS, OS/2, AIX and Windows; the tools will use a Basic similar to Visual Basic and include object-oriented extensions to the Basic language.
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp has turned to PictureTel Corp for help in developing a desktop video conferencing system to be used over the company’s public ISDN network.
Time Warner Inc chairman Gerald Levin does not buy the conventional wisdom: he says equipment costs in the company’s Orlando, Florida interactive cable system have dropped sharply: a switching device needed to provide on-demand services to homes in Orlando, had cost $3m 18 months ago but now costs $100,000.
The Turkish parliament has passed a bill allowing the government to float or otherwise sell up to 49% of Turk Telekom; sale of shares on international and domestic markets is likely to take place next year.
Computer Sciences Corp has signed a 10-year agreement with Computer Associates International Inc under which it will standardise on the Islandia, New York company’s products in its facilities management operations throughout the world and also make the software available for use throughout its other business groups: El Segundo, California-based Computer Sciences also becomes an authorised reseller for up to $50m of CA-Unicenter and CA-OpenIngres; the deal primarily avoids the kind of acrimonious rows that Computer Associates has had with facilities managers where it suspects them of using its software for the benefit of customers that have not been licensed to use it.
Singapore Telecommunications Ltd has acquired an additional stake of 4.5% in the Yorkshire Cable Group Ltd, bringing its total holding to 50%, which cuts Yorkshire Water Plc out of the picture; it paid #10.5m cash; the other 50% stake in the firm is held by General Cable Plc.
Hitachi Ltd is to acquire a 12.3% stake in US satellite information service company EarthWatch Inc for $14m: EarthWatch provides high-resolution geographic data using lightweight satellites, and Hitachi gets exclusive rights to sell the data in Japan and throughout Asia.
Telefonica de Espana SA is to link its own data network with IBM Corp’s Global Data Network: Telefonica Servicios Avanzados de Informacion has 700 subscribers to its national Electronic Data Interchange service and expects to double the number of users this year.
Sony Corp was not far behind Toshiba Corp in rushing forward to say that its 7.4Gb Digital Video Disk standard also meets all the requirements laid down by the US computer industry grouping: in terms of acolytes, Toshiba seems to have won all the non-captive entertainment companies, the attraction being that its system is claimed to deliver better prictures while Sony has support of most of the Far Eastern peripherals manufacturers.
Focus Enhancements Inc, Woburn, Massachusetts is winning more business from Apple Computer Inc, which will bundle the Focus L-TV Portable Pro proprietary video scan converter with a new line of Macintoshes for the educational market: Apple expects to purchase an additional 60,000 units by the end of the year, valued at up to $10m in revenues for Focus; during the first six months of the agreement, which began in 1994, Apple took than 23,000 L-TV Portable Pro units for the US and international markets; the product enables the user to display personal computer-generated video output directly to most standard television sets and video cassette recorders for instructional or multimedia presentations.
Lotus Development Corp plans to expand its sales and support operations in the People’s Republic of China and accelerate efforts to localise its products for the Chinese market: it will also launch a Business Partners programme in China and establish product development groups at two of China’s major academic institutions, and a customer support
centre in Peking.
GTE Corp plans to have video dialtone networks in three markets by the end of the year now that is has received approval from the US Federal Communications Commission: the networks will use fibre optic and coaxial cable to deliver up to 248 channels of broadcast and cable programming to customers in Ventura County, California; Pasco and Pinellas counties, Florida; and Honolulu, Hawaii; the next market for the service will be Manassas, Virginia; GTE says that it aims to bring interactive television technology to 900,000 homes by 1997.
Southern New England Telecommunications Corp, New Haven, Connecticut has won a court challenge allowing it to provide television programming in its own service area after it contested the constitutionality of the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984: It just didn’t make sense to be banned from providing programming on our own network while we have a policy of allowing everyone else who wants to provide programming, including the cable companies we compete with, to provide programmes on our network, said Cory Mitchell, the company’s president of multimedia services.
