Yesterday, Escom AG announced it had signed a letter of intent to sell Amiga Technologies to its Chicago licensee Visual Information Services Corp. It looks as if all the ambitious plans outlined by the Escom for its Amiga Technologies GmbH acquisition will come to naught. With the resignation of its founder last month, everything now seems to be up in the air at the severely overstretched German personal computer manufacturer.Viscorp, a company formed specifically to exploit Amiga technologies in set- top devices, and with former Commodore International Ltd engineering staff on the strength, also plans to buy the intellectual property rights to Commodore Business Machines, but the Heppenheimer said it would retain marketing rights for Commodore products. The transaction is valued at around $40m, Escom said. Visual Information Services already had a license to use Amiga technologies in its planned television set-top box (CI No 2,797). That license gave it the right to use, relicense and distribute the Amiga operating system and compatible parts of current versions and future updates of the technologies where the Amiga products are used as, or as part of, interactive television devices. The set-top device is intended to provide access to on- line services, telephony, electronic mail and facsimile capabilities using a television set instead of a computer. Visual Information Services is owned by Global Telephone & Communications Inc, incorporated in Nevada, which changed its name to Viscorp when it acquired the Chicago-based company.
