Compagnie des Machines Bull SA and France Telecom have brought in NEC Corp on a project to develop a new multimedia on-line information service that sounds like a follow-on to Minitel, since it is being conceived as a Yellow Pages-type directory, but with video, speech and text content. The project is budgeted at some $3m over the next two years, and France Telecom will be responsible for development of the fibre optic infrastructure, Bull will handle systems integration, and NEC will develop servers and software. The system is intended to be available in France from around 1997.NEC describes its contribution as hypermedia servers and says that it may also called on for Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches.
