Siemens AG wants to do its bit to give peace a chance: its Croatian subidiary is about to open an office in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo: potential fields of interest for Siemens in Bosnia range from medical equipment and railways to communication lines and power-generating technology, the firm said.
The UK Office of Telecommunications on Friday published a consultative document on charges paid by UK telephone companies to British Telecommunications Plc and Mercury Communications Ltd for handling their international calls, saying a change in the method of calculating these interconnection charges could ensure a fairer deal for customers.
The Office of Telecommunications also said it wanted to remove the price cap on British Telecommunications Plc’s line rental charges, and was starting consultation: the increase is currently limited to inflation plus two percentage points a year, but the market now enjoys substantial competition, so prices are likely to fall regardless of the regulatory rules.
Reuters Holdings Plc launches Equity Focus Broker, a product that will enable users to trade small company shares on the London Stock Exchange, today: market participants can already use their Reuter terminals to trade on the new Tradepoint electronic exchange.
The Uniworld joint venture of Unisource BV and AT&T Corp is now very close to making its expected purchase of at least 25% of Communications Network International GmbH, majority-owned by Mannesmann AG, to make AT&T Mannesmann’s major international partner in Germany.
Commenting on its figures (page seven) Oracle Corp said it had record results in the second quarter ended November 30 and expects earnings to continue growing: This was a quarter which was pretty consistent with most of the quarters in the past year-and-a-half and we don’t see any slowdown, the company said; software licence revenues overall grew 41% year-to-year, but gains varied across its three businesses – applications, servers and tools – licence revenue for Applications grew 104%, database licence revenue 44%, but the Tools business continued weak, growing only about 9% year-on-year.
MultiTech Systems Inc, Minneapolis won a US patent for its Digital Simultaneous Voice & Data technique.
Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA is in talks with IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc and Oracle Corp about their adopting the $500 ARM RISC-based NetSurfer developed by its 58%-owned Acorn Computer Group Plc, Bloomberg Business News quotes Riccardo Ruggiero of Olivetti Telemedia saying: the new machines should be ready to ship by second quarter next year.
Tustin, California-based contract maintenance and repair outfit Cerplex Group Inc has signed a memorandum of understanding and has entered into negotiations with Rank Xerox Ltd to acquire that company’s repair and refurbishment operations based near Lille, northern France.
Zenith Electronics Corp will invest $45.6m in an effort to increase turnover by adding high-resolution colour cathode ray tubes for monitors at a new line at its colour picture tube plant in Melrose Park, Illinois; the new line will have production capacity of more than 1m 17 tubes annually, but will not be ready until second quarter 1997.
AT&T Corp’s AT&T Network Systems is close to sealing its deal to buy the public communications subsidiaries of Philips Electronics NV in France and Germany: AT&T’s equipment division announced earlier this year plans to buy parts of Philips public communications subsidiaries Telecommunications Radioelectriques et Telephoniques SA and Philips Kommunikations Industrie GmbH; We plan to take over more than 2,000 employees from PKI and to expand facilities in Nuremberg, making it an international service and distribution centre for AT&T, the company said in Germany; AT&T will take over around two thirds of loss-making PKI, and is keenly interested in the company’s Groupe Speciale Mobile standard cellular telephone kit and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy network equipment.
AT&T Corp won a $1,500m to $2,500m global pact to provide the US Navy, Coast Guard and Marines with communications services over 10 years.
Under the deal between General Electric Co Inc’s NBC and Microsoft Corp, Microsoft will invest $220m for a 50% stake in NBC’s America’s Talking cable network, which will be renamed msNBC and will become an all-news channel, and the two will each spend $200m over the next five years on operating the new venture, which will be accessible on the World Wide Web as well as cable.
The technology team behind the Euro 96 European football championships in England next year revealed itself on Friday ahead of yesterday’s draw: Sema Group Plc leads the team as system integrator, Microsoft Corp will provide the software for Digital Equipment Corp’s 500 personal computers and 32 servers, and British Telecommunications Plc will do the telecommunications infrastructure to link the eight grounds to the world’s media, for what is the third largest sporting event in the world behind the World Cup and the Olympics; the companies will effectively lend the technology for the tournament, worth around #10m in total in return for media exposure and rights to use the logo.
If you feel you’ll be left in the dust if you don’t have your very own Web page out there in cyberspace, do be very sure that you’re ready to go before you launch it – it’s much better to remain a no show than to do what the UK Press Association has been doing, promising the latest cricket scores when there is an England-South Africa test match on in Durban, as it was doing on Friday, and only giving the scores from the one-day match played the previous Sunday.
Symantec Corp has licensed the Java Internet programming language from Sun Microsystems Inc and released what it describes as the first Java development environment for Windows95 and NT, code named Espresso.
Fremont, California-based ESS Technology Inc has definitive agreement to acquire VideoCore Technology Inc for up to about 615,000 new ESS shares and about $6m in cash: a substantial majority of the price will have to be written off as research and development in process; VideoCore is developing chips that, once completed, will incorporate advanced compression technology for desktop digital video; ESS Technology is a supplier of mixed signal personal computer audio offerings.
Bill’n’Melinda are infanticipating.
Shares in Corel Corp continued a to tumble in Toronto and on Nasdaq last week, triggered by it telling company analysts that it will not release its CorelDraw 7.0 software upgrade until October 1996: a Levesque Beaubien Geoffrion analyst said he had cut his rating on the stock to a hold from a strong buy because of concerns about what impact the delay will have on Corel’s turnover; Corel was originally to release the upgrade next July.
What does he care? Microsoft Corp no doubt supplies all the applications – the MacWeek gossip column reveals that Bill Gates’s alma mater, Lakeside High School in Washington state is an all-Mac shop.
