SAP AG says it expects its research and development spending to rise to $409m or more in 1995 compared with $252m last year based on the parent company’s current level of research and development spending of about 20% to 25% of turnover: it reckons that by the end of this year the US will eclipse Germany as the company’s main source of revenue; in the first half of this year, Germany accounted for 30% or $236m of consolidated sales of $760.3m, and the US accounted for 29.1%, $229m. – o – The shares of Dallas, Texas maker of document recognition systems Recognition International Inc rose sharply last week to close up 16% at $12.50 after the US regulators cleared the $180m sale of the company to BancTec Inc, Dallas provider of integrated financial transaction processing systems, and application software and support services. – o – Compaq Computer Corp said it has started shipping its much-anticipated LTE 5000 notebook computer to stores within the past week, giving its shares a further boost: analysts had cut their earnings estimates last week because of a possible delay in the shipment of the LTE 5000 but Bear Stearns analyst Andy Neff reiterated a recommendation to buy, saying Compaq was comfortable with third quarter estimates of $0.85 to $0.95 a share. – o – Motorola Inc’s transmission products division is cutting prices by as much as $120 to $375 for its BitSURFR Digital Modem and BitSURFR PC Cards for personal computers: the modems, which are compatible with Windows and Macintosh computer systems, enable transmission speeds up to four times faster than 28.8Kbps modems, says the company. – o – CenterLine Software Inc, Cambridge, Massachusetts has put its C/C++ development tools up under AIX Unix; TestCenter starts at $1,500 and CodeCenter costs from $2,000. – o – Quantum Corp has added to its DLT2000 product line with the DLT200XT 5.25 form factor tape drive, designed for mid-range systems, network servers and high-end computer systems: the Milpitas company claims its offers 15Gb of storage uncompressed, 30Gb compressed, which is 50% greater than the DLT2000, and a data transfer rate of 2.5Mbps; this is double the capacity, and two and a half times faster than helical scan drives in this arena from the likes of Exabyte Corp, reckons Quantum; it uses CompacTape IIIXT tape, a proprietary tape for the Digital Linear Tape line which is read and write compatible with the existing, higher capacity DLT4000 drives; it is available now and costs $2,400. – o – For the record… After universal opprobrium from the press, the Securities & Investments Board, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Office of Fair Trading, the London Stock Exchange staged a humiliating climb-down on Wednesday night and agreed to provide live share prices to Electronic Share Information Ltd, the company formed to offer a UK share-dealing service backed up by Sharelink Plc over the Internet.
And in an echo of the launch of its television service way back in 1936, the British Broadcasting Corp on Wednesday duly started Digital Audio Broadcasting, putting out Radios One to Five Live digitally, despite their being virtually no sets out there capable of receiving it: as with the original television service, the broadcasts are initially to the Greater London area and cover about 20% of the population.
British electronic equipment maker Telspec Plc reports that it has received orders worth ú23m for delivery over the next two years of pair gain equipment, bringing its order book to about ú70m from ú64m at the end of June: it gave no commercial details of the orders but said they were for the export of two and four-channel pair gain equipment.
Boston, Massachusetts-based Teradyne Inc has gone to Analogy Inc, Beaverton, Oregon, for analogue simulation and analysis software tools for use in testing and repairing the B-2 Stealth Bomber: Teradyne is supplying automatic test programme development stations to Pico Rivera, California-based Northrop-Grumman Inc, the main contractor in the B-2 Depot automatic test equipment programme, an
d Analogy’s MAST hardware description language and Saber simulator software will be used to create a virtual test environment, in a deal worth $2m to the Oregon-based firm.
AirTouch Communications Inc, San Fransisco, announced its ninth Japanese cellular phone venture with a 4.5% stake in new company Digital TU-KA Shikoku Co Ltd which will serve a region of over 4m people: the company has holdings in nine regions covering most of the 125m Japanese population with interests in Tokyo Digital Phone, Kansai Digital Phone and Central Japan Digital Phone and 4.5% interests in five other Japanese cellular companies.
San Francisco-based Walker Interactive Systems Inc is to spend up to $6.0m buying in shares on the open market in a programme expected to last for two years and funded by its cash balances; the move is to avoid dilution from employee share options and stock purchase plans.- o -Pacific Internet Inc, Culver City, California is adding Linux-based Caldera Network Desktop to its Web-in-a-Box Internet server software.
What are Britain’s metric fascists, who from Sunday have made it a criminal offence to sell goods in convenient Imperial weights and measurements (are you 1,829 millimetres or 0.001829 metres tall?) for a system that must have been devised by people so innumerate that they could only count on their fingers (otherwise they would have based it on 12 and not 10) going to do about the continentals who blithely go on saying that their computers need three metres of 19-inch racking?
