Three-dimensional kung fu straight out of the television screen: Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd has formed a strategic alliance with local movie producer Fitto Mobile to explore and exploit opportunities in interactive programming: the effort will culminate in the release of a new movie, My Mistress, My Wife, through the phone company’s video-on-demand system: the movie is an English version of Fitto Mobile’s Cantonese production Green Hat and was shot from the same script at the same time on the same set, but using a different cast and language; Green Hat will premiere this weekend in theatres, while My Mistress, My Wife will start video on demanding in August.
Newbridge Networks Corp has signed Digital Equipment Corp as a value-added reseller of its products in Europe: the DEC network services group will resell the Newbridge MainStreet family of multiplexers, the 36120 MainStreet Packet Transfer Exchange product for Frame Relay and the 4601/4602 Mainstreet network management systems, and will advise customers on the use of Newbridge products, offer to carry out implementation, and provide full ongoing service and support.
Tandy Corp’s Computer City is to enter the direct marketing channel this summer and offer a catalogue of up to 2,500 hardware and software products to users in the US.
ERG Ltd, Perth, Western Australia is to supply Mitsubishi Corp and Sony Corp with contactless Smart Cards and card readers for use in a Hong Kong transport venture: Creative Star Ltd, a joint venture formed in June 1994 by five of Hong Kong’s major passenger transport companies, has given ERG a contract to design and install the world’s first large-scale ticketing system that uses contactless Smart Cards.
The Network Connection Inc, Alpharetta, Georgia reports that BellSouth Interactive Media Services has chosen its Cheetah Video Server to be used as part of the personal computer services area of BellSouth’s upcoming video-on-demand trial in the Chamblee suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, beginning shortly: the Cheetah Video Server is designed to use only non-proprietary protocols and client-server standards, and the box runs under Windows NT.
Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co, once regarded as a peaceful retirement home for superannuated senior Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications personnel, is finding life very tough these days, and says it is considering reducing its parent company work force by 600 to 3,600 by the fiscal year to March 1998.
Who’d want to run a big, bureaucratic telephone company these days? A fascinating snippet in a Wall Street Journal piece reporting that Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and Bell Atlantic Corp are lining up an international phone company to become a third partner in their 67%-33% Infostrada SpA telecommunications services joint venture to challenge Telecom Italia SpA has Olivetti saying it is considering offering speech telephony services over the Internet: quality is terrible these days, but will get better, and all you’d need to create a standard Internet phone would be a board you’d build into an ordinary telephone that included a sound chip set, a simple processor to run the communications software and the VocalTec or Camelot Internet phone software, and a modem – in volume you could knock out the phones for a cost of about $200 a time, and users would be able to call anyone similarly equipped anywhere in the world for the cost of a local call, and use the public switched telephone network for all other calls.
In announcing it has definitive agreement with the GE Capital arm of General Electric Co Inc for an alliance on facilities management, Andersen Consulting appends an editor’s note that Andersen Consulting is not a division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen & Co – but the fig-leaf is well-nigh transparent, because although the two are separate partnerships, they each have to pay part of their profits to a holding partnership, which distributes them to partners of both sides, so that each has major interest in promoting the services
of the other where possible.
Takaoka Electric Manufacturing Co is licensing Menlo Park, California-based Competitive Automation’s Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol client software for its X-mint family of X terminals: the product connects devices to TCP/IP networks and Digital Equipment Corp has already licensed the same technology for Digital Unix on Alpha.
Lyon-based Infogrammes Entertainment SA has selected Philips-TRT SA to manufacture the special modems for its Infonie on-line service, which is due to launch in October: its multimedia content is stored on Sun Microsystems Inc servers, the biggest multimedia servers in Europe, Sun tells Infogrammes; the servers hold 55 hours of video and handle 1,000 simultaneous calls.
Dublin-based Iona Technologies Ltd has won Boeing Co for its Orbix object request broker in a deal that it estimates to be worth $750,000.
AT&T Corp’s AT&T Global Information Solutions has introduced the first servers in its Globalyst personal computer line, offered with Pentiums ranging from 60MHz to 133MHz.
Information Superhighway is not such a super term for many: according to the Wall Street Journal, John Sculley thinks it smacks too much of massive construction projects and prefers Information Supermarket, while in France, it conjures up images of toll roads where you keep having to stop and pay…
