Shares in Komag Inc and Seagate Technology Inc have been excitable this week on gossip that Seagate is interested in buying Komag, which manufactures hard disk platters: Seagate declined to comment on Komag but said it was looking at a lot of different companies to purchase on a given day or week.
Pacific Telesis Group Inc has chosen Scientific-Atlanta Inc as the key supplier and integrator of its video delivery system and has ordered video head-end equipment and television set-top terminals: purchases from Pacific Bell and Pacific Telesis Video Services units could total $150m over three years.
Live results and candidates’ declarations from the first round of the French Presidential elections on Sunday were available on the Internet via France Telecom’s VTCOM subsidiary, France Television, and Silicon Graphics Inc: the interactive forum about the 1995 presidential elections, Presidentielle 95, is VTCOM’s first Internet server and features complete information on the functioning of the Presidency in France, details on electoral and voting procedures, photos, videos and audio excerpts from the campaign trail; it will also carry live results from the second round of voting on May 7; France Telecom-VTCOM said it expanded the capacity of its Internet server connection to 512Kbps to support a larger number users; an ISDN connection to the Fr ance 3 newsroom provides for downloading text and image data; international users can access the service directly at www.vtcom.fr
GPT Communications Systems Ltd has been appointed the prime contractor in a #45m contract for a Nationwide Communications System for the Saudi Arabian National Guard, which was awarded to the UK Ministry of Defence: GPT will operate and maintain the system, and train users.
The Greater Manchester Police force has gone to ICL Plc for a new set of communications systems in a deal worth ú5m: ICL’s ICL Enterprises operation is to provide speech and data links and closed circuit television systems to the police force.
Keane Inc, Boston is to buy Community Health Computing Inc, a hospital information system division formerly known as Infostat, of Dallas: the company, which provides Unix-based clinical and financial information systems for acute-care hospitals and medical centres, and its parent, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December; the addition of Community Health customers brings Keane’s client base to about 240 hospitals; terms of the agreement were not revealed.
At its next management-unions committee meeting early next month, Alcatel CIT SA is expected to announce some 542 job cuts, Les Echos reports: 360 of the jobs are expected to come from the company’s site in La Verriere, handling PABX installation, with the rest coming from its factory in Cherbourg, the paper said; the cuts signal the final closure of the factory, which has been running down its activities over the last five years; it hopes to achieve the cuts without making any compulsory redundancies.
There is a big price in independence and freedom of action to be paid when a video games developer sells out to one of the colossi of the hardware industry, and Psygnosis Ltd, which did 16-bit games for a variety of players and for CD-ROM, is going to be required to confine itself to games for the Sony Corp PlayStation: the company is dropping production of games for competitors like Sega Enterprises Ltd and Nintendo Co to focus on the PlayStation, which has sold 700,000 since it was launched in Japan in December; Sony Electronic Publishing is also expected to merge the Sony Imagesoft and Psygnosis divisions into a new entity to be called Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Iomega Corp, Roy, Utah has applied its Bernoulli high-capacity hard shell floppy disk technology to the problem of finding an easy way of backing up today’s increasingly capacious desktop hard disks that still seem to fill up in no time, and has come up with the $200 Zip drive, which stores 100Mb on its $20 cartridges, and plugs into the par
allel port – and includes a new parallel port for the printer – whereupon it looks to the machine like an extra floppy drive once the set-up software has been installed.
Tee-Comm Electronics Inc has given the Celestica Inc unit of IBM Canada Ltd a $70m contract to assemble 80% of the electronics for its Star Trak 1000 digital direct-to-home satellite television kit.
Still happens occasionally: the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration has completed the first phase of a $26m migration to an IBM Corp 3090-600E running DB2 from an 1100/92 mainframe from Unisys Corp.
Motorola Inc’s Paging Products Group, Boynton Beach, Florida plans to build a new facility in Chihuahua, Mexico, to support expansion of its paging manufacturing operations in the Latin American region: the 250,000 square foot facility is expected to be ready in mid-1996.
SAP AG has an $11.8m order from Daimler-Benz AG for the R/3 client-server software over the next three years as Daimler, which already uses R/3 in some parts of the company, extends it company-wide.
You thought communism was totally discredited, dead as flat-earthism, did you? In Indonesia, they’re not so sure and they are not taking any chances: according to the Jakarta Post, the authorities have seized Nintendo Co Ltd games cartridges for fear that they might incite a new outbreak of rampant communism – and the heinous offence? Blink and you’ll miss it, but the old hammer and sickle symbol appears in the 20th frame of a 1,200-frame game.
