The launch of Windows95 is now only likely to be in August, Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates said yesterday: It doesn’t have to be in August – in order to make the August date, we’ll need to begin manufacturing in July; if we don’t think it’s ready, we’ll pick another date, but the August date is likely; he added that while most of the feedback on the program has been positive, some users have had problems getting it up and running.
AT&T Corp, Intel Corp and Lotus Development Corp yesterday announced an alliance to provide integrated interoperable videoconferencing products and services: the development will link AT&T WorldWorx Network Services, AT&T Network Notes, Intel ProShare Personal Conferencing, Lotus Notes and Lotus Video Notes across computer networks and standard phone lines so that Notes users could place video and data conference calls over the WorldWorx network, leave video messages and store and retrieve video and data files from Notes or Network Notes.
Pacific Telesis Group Inc is buying Cross Country Wireless Inc for $120m in shares and repayment of $55m in debt, $175m all told; Cross Country holds licences and rights to provide wireless video by microwave in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, Riverside and San Diego; PacTel plans to use digital transmission and compression technology to provide 100 channels of programming in the area, which covers 5m people, in the first challenge to cable television in California; it hopes to supply digital service to the 5m homes by the end of 1996, at a time when its wired broadband network will reach only 1m homes.
Ascom Holding AG, Berne announced yesterday that it is acquiring Elsydel SA, described as one of the leading suppliers of toll collection and parking systems in France.
Apple Computer Inc’s sacrificial lion, Ian Diery is expected by MacWeek to resurface soon as head of manufacturing in Austin for Mac clone-maker Power Computing Inc.
Commenting on the company’s first quarter figures (page seven) Texas Instruments Inc’s chief financial officer Bill Aylesworth said demand for memory chips is very strong, and pricing for the parts is firm.
IBM Corp will maintain its stake in Compagnie des Machines Bull SA at 1.78%, which means it will contribute a token $4m for new shares.
Compagnie Generale des Eaux SA says that among its telecommunications activities, it plans to experiment with a cordless phone system linked to cable, and will spend $200m in telecommunications development this year; it says its telecommunications business is expected to reach $200m this year, up from $125m in 1994, and hit to $500m by 1997.
Commenting on some dismal figures, Weitek Corp says it does not expect improved operating results in the next six months but we believe that our focused product development effort together with our reduced expense base will allow us to successfully bring our Enterprise family of products to market, Weitek president Barry Cox said.
NEC Corp says its domestic Japanese personal computer sales in the year to March 31 rose 13% to $6,385m; it forecasts 11% growth for this year; unit shipments rose by 32% in the year; it sees 27% growth this year.
Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG appointed Richard Lussier to the post of president and chief executive of Siemens Nixdorf Americas in addition to his post of chairman of its Pyramid Technology Corp unit.
Apple Computer Inc unveiled the Apple StyleWriter 1200 monochrome inkjet printer for the Macintosh: the printer provides 720 by 360 dots-per-inch resolution in black and white and 360 by 360 dots-per-inch resolution in grayscale; it is out available in the US at $270; a new QuickTake 150 camera offers a choice between high- and standard-quality settings; image quality has been enhanced with new image processing, and infra-red lens and sensor coatings to give base resolution of 640 by 480 pixels for all images; the camera can store 32 standard-quality or 16 high-quality 24-bit colour images, or a
combination of both; a snap-on close-up lens system enables users to capture high-quality images from 10 to 14 away and the new lens also features a flash disperser; the QuickTake 150 for Macintosh and QuickTake 150 for Windows are $740 with all the necessary software, cables, batteries and the charger.
Integrated Device Technology Inc has formed a new unit, Centaur Technology Inc, in Austin, Texas to develop RISC-based microprocessor hardware and software components that will improve the performance of the company’s MIPS RISC family.
SKC Ltd, a unit of South Korea’s Sunkyong Group, has become the second Korean company to support Japan’s Toshiba Corp in the battle of the digital video disk standards: Toshiba’s super density format is better, especially, in terms of storage capacity and manufacturability, over the Sony Corp rival, said SKC, a leading manufacturer of magnetic tapes and optical disks.
Commenting on first quarter figures (page seven) Conner Peripherals Inc said its results had been hurt by pricing pressure and product delays; product returns by a major customer have also plagued Conner recently; the production delays in the recent quarter stemmed from a combination of technical launch issues and component shortages during critical ramp-up phases.
San Jose, California-based VLSI Technology Inc says it has accelerated its capacity expansion plans at its San Antonio and San Jose fabrication plants to keep up with demand for integrated circuits, and says the expansion should increase manufacturing capacity 30% by the end of this year; VLSI also noted that Intel Corp sold 5.3m shares of VLSI common during the quarter, liquidating its 14.6% stake in the company; Intel still holds a warrant to buy 2.7m shares exercisable at $11.69 per share by August 25.
Read-Rite Corp, Milpitas reports that its Sunward Technologies Inc subsidiary has begun the manufacture of magnetoresistive tape heads at its Manila, Philippines plant.
Apple Computer Inc cut the price on the PowerBook 150 by 27% to $1,070, and added a new configuration with twice the hard drive capacity, 250Mb, selling for $1,230 with 4Mb.
Privately-held Providence, Rhode Island-based Cadre Technologies Inc is to acquire Westmount Technology BV of Delft, the Netherlands on undisclosed terms: Westmount is a provider enterprise development tools for the client-server market.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Sunnyvale, California says it has decided to redeem its poison pill anti-takeover measure at its par value – a handsome one penny per share.
Sasib SpA, controlled by the De Benedetti holding company Cir, has bought Telefonia Ferroviaria SpA from Philips SpA: the telephone company builds and installs transmission and phone systems for large users like the railways and motorways; Telefonia Ferroviaria will be taken over by Sasib Railways, which builds railway plant and accounts for some 32% of Sasib’s total turnover; terms were not disclosed.
Digital Equipment Corp claims it has shipped more than 100,000 Alpha AXP RISC-based systems worth more than $3,000m and expects to have shifted a further $1,500m of Alphas by the time the first Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp or Sun Microsystems Inc 64-bit systems are shipped.
Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp and Rockwell International Corp are to establish a jointly-owned company, American Space Lines Inc, to develop, operate and market the X-34, a reusable launch vehicle for lifting satellites into orbit: the project, which is being pursued in partnership with the National Aeronautics & Space Administration aims to deliver payloads for a third of the cost of current means.
Cycomm International Inc, New York has bought the assets and business of AT&T Corp’s Advanced Cellular Privacy System, an analogue-based scrambler system that provides privacy for cellular communications; the terms have not been disclosed.
High definition television looks like an idea whose time has gone, but the US Fed
eral Communications Commission has allocated second channels to television stations in expectation of the new service: it is now being asked by the television industry to allow stations to decide what they want to transmit on the spare channels, suggesting that they may want to use them for home shopping or subscription packages of entertainment or news; anything new is likely to be digital, and there is a groundswell of pressure for the spare frequencies to be auctioned rather than granted.
Hewlett-Packard Co reports that a CBS Inc affiliate in Tucson, Arizona has become the first television station to broadcast daily programming using its media server; it has started with commercials on disk, replacing robots and analogue tapes, and plans to extend its use to news editing and time-delayed network programming in the near future; the station says it has eliminated on-air mistakes by a factor of 10 since it put in the system.
Sybase Inc is continuing with its spending spree and has bought its Brazilian distributor, Technologia Cliente/Servidor Informatica SA from CI Compucenter, and will operate it as a local subsidiary, called Sybase do Brasil Software Ltda.
Houston-based BMC Software Inc has bought what sounds quite a hot property from an Australian company, Fondi Software Pty Ltd: DDLI Dynamic Reorg is claimed to provide near on-line IMS database reorganisation by taking a copy of the database so that users continue to have access to the original while the shadow is reorganised; any updates or changes that occur during the reorganisation are captured in a file and applied to the shadow after reorganisation, with the majority applied while the database is on-line so that the only downtime occurs when the shadow database is renamed to replace the original database and the last few updates are applied; Dynamic Reorg will be generally available from BMC Software in May when pricing will be announced.
Springfield, Missouri-based Applied Cellular Technology Inc has acquired a 29% stake in privately held computer-aided design software developer Cadkey Inc; but terms were not disclosed; it also bought a $1m 10% demand note from Cadkey.
Atlanta-based Cox Communications Inc is to invest more than $1,000m over the next five years to upgrade its network for cable and telephony services: Cox says it intends to spend $500m to finance its entry into the telephony market, $300m to $500m on its alliance with Sprint Corp for wireless and wire-line service, $150m to $250m in its Personal Communications Services operation in southern California.
Denver, Colorado-based Creative Programming & Technology Ventures Inc has a letter of intent to acquire a significant majority interest in RFX Inc of Hollywood, California: it will pay about $15m through a combination of cash and debt for its stake in RFX, which resells workstations with computer-generated imaging software, mostly for production of three-dimensional animation in the motion picture, television, and multimedia markets.
The Xerox Corp-Novell Inc Document Enabled Networking joint venture is to merge with the IBM Corp-Saros Corp Shamrock Document Management Technologies joint venture to form the Document Management Alliance: its mission will be to deliver industry specifications to provide universal interoperability among all document management applications, services and repositories.
Santa Clara, California-headquartered 3Com Corp has opened a new testing facility at its Premises Development Division in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire: the company promises that the new facility will cut product development test times to a third of the current rates.
Novell Inc claims that over 70 of the Times Top 100 companies in the UK have NetWare installed with substantial numbers of users and of these, over 30% are implementing NetWare 4.1 and a further 25% expect to upgrade in the next nine months – poor saps: our experience here at Apt Data Group Plc is that 4.1 is an absolute pain to install, even when you
do discover the patches that Novell does not seem any to keen too tell anybody about.
Northern Telecom Ltd has an $18m order from MicroCell 1-2-1 Inc for Personal Communications Services network infrastructure equipment and services over three years: MicroCell 1-2-1 is building a national network in Canada using Groupe Speciale Mobile equipment to provide integrated mobile speech, data and facsimile services when it receives the 1.9GHz licence it expects to get from Industry Canada.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB has a $100m contract with Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co for the supply and installation of fixed telephone lines in metropolitan Manila and Cebu: the contract includes supply and installation of both fibre optic and copper cable networks.
United Communication Plc of Bangkok has taken a 65% stake in the project to build a ground control station to provide telecommunications services from the Iridium Inc low-orbit satellite network.
Convex Computer Corp has announced the C590 tape drive and C494 tape robotics designed for massive tape libraries and compatible with IBM Corp’s recently announced 3950 tape library: the company claims data transfer rates as high as 9Mbps and storage of 10Gb a tape and more than 3Tb can be stored uncompressed – sounds like the Emass system.
PeopleSoft Inc has transferred its corporate headquarters to Pleasanton, California from Walnut Creek.
The UK’s National Health Service’s pensions agency has gone to a partnership lead by McDonnell Information Systems Ltd for a five year, รบ8.6m contract that includes software, hardware, facilities management and payment services: ICL Enterprises and Paymaster, formerly the Paymaster General’s Office are the other partners in the contract.
Exabyte Corp has announced the EXB-10h tape library, an 8mm tape library for local area networks that uses the company’s EXB-8505XL tape drive: Exabyte says it can store up to 70Gb of uncompressed data on 10 cartridges; with compression the capacity rises to 140Gb; Exabyte says the new library has improved robotics systems, a new tape mounting mechanism and a cartridge mechanism; the library is available now but the company gave no prices.
Not everyone that gets laid off at IBM Corp is unhappy: one tipster told the PC Week gossip column the tale of a friend laid off from IBM a year ago after being offered $25,000 to leave; she got a job at a local consulting firm and her first assignment was back in her old area at IBM, working for the same group, but now as a consultant: last week, her old manager offered her the old job back, including a promotion, a pay rise, and all of her seniority back!
