Shares in Virtuality Group Plc shed thruppence on Friday at 243 pence – churlish response to the liklihood that Sega Enterprises Ltd is likely to have need for lots more of the Virtuality arcade virtual reality machines it commissioned last year now that it has plans for 100 new amusement centres in the US over the next five years in partnership with DreamWorks SKG and MCA Inc. – o – High noon looms for Apple Computer Inc chief Michael Spindler today if Cable NBC’s indefatigable Dan Dorfman has not got his wires crossed: Dorfman says that top executives inside Apple are saying openly that Spindler will be booted out and it’s only a matter of time before it happens: he is going for the board meeting that’s set for today. – o – North Sioux City, South Dakota-based Gateway 2000 Inc has chosen somewhere more accessible for its new $18m personal computer manufacturing plant: it is to be in Hampton, Virginia; manufacturing operations are to begin in August next year and employment is projected to get near 1,000 by 1999, with about 250 workers hired by end-1996. – o – IBM Corp’s move to consolidate its Personal Software Products division could result in even further delays for OS/2 for the PowerPC, PC Week reckons: OS/2 for the PowerPC, formally known as Warp Connect PowerPC Edition, is already more than a year late, but moving the developers associated with the project week, is likely to result in schedules slipping further, sources close to IBM told the paper, as a significant proportion of the people working on it in Boca Raton are contractors not expected to make the move across country to Austin. – o – SBC Communications Inc is the last Baby Bell to change its accounting methods and take a vast hit for it: the damage is $2,800m after tax, to cover the cost of discontinuing the use of accounting standards required for regulated companies; the charge primarily reflects an ad justment to the book value of phone plant through an increase in accumulated depreciation stemming from adoption of asset lives shorter than those set by regulators. – o – TT Group Plc has bought laminations supplier Linton & Hirst Group Ltd, Swindon, Wiltshire for ú16.8m: Linton, with annual turnover of ú27.1m is intended to strengthen its existing range of magnetic components. – o – IBM Corp has begun shipments, as promised (CI No 2,717), of its long-awaited 3590 High Performance Tape Subsystem and the Magstar tape drive, both as stand-alone products and combined as the 3494 Tape Library Dataservers: and as we predicted, the Escon version of the Magstar and Dataserver, which was to have been available by now, will not now be available until the fourth quarter of 1996 (CI No 2,720); the volume stacking capability, which will really make use of the new cartridges’ capability to store 30Gb of compressed data, will not ship until the year after. – o – Vodafone Group Plc said it had in excess of 148,000 net connections to its mobile telephone network, of which more than 50% were digital, during July, August and September, bringing its total subscriber base to 2.2m, with 325,000 on its digital network and over 1m subscribers to its LowCall infrequent user tariff: the churn rate fell to 24.9% the year ending September 30 from 28.5% in the year to end-March; it said the summer quarter is traditionally slower, and the result was better than last year and up to its expectations; the shares, which had fallen to 255 pence ahead of the figures, edged up to 259 pence, still down 6.5p. – o – Taiwan computer maker Acer Inc’s group turnover will hit the equivalent of $4,774m in 1995 up from a previous forecast of $4,039m, group chairman Stan Shih told a news conference: he said this was due to the sales of the company’sr new home personal computer line Aspire introduced in the US on September 5 since when Acer has sold more than 60,000 Aspire computers; Acer said it hopes to sell more than 1m units of Aspire in 1996, and 2m in 1997. – o – AirTouch Communications Inc’s cellular venture in Madras, India, RPG Cellular Services Pvt Ltd has began service, making it the fi
rst cellular operator in Madras: Airtouch designed and built the network and owns 20% of RPG Cellular, RPG Enterprises holds 51% and Vodafone Group Plc owns 26%; AirTouch and RPG Enterprises have applied for a cellular licence in Madhya Pradesh, a region with about 70m population, and other regions of the country.
The dread Soderblom Token Ring patent strikes again: Cabletron Systems Inc has been sued by Willemijn Houdstermaatschappij BV of Rotterdam for alleged infringement of the patent for effective communication among numerous computer terminals; Willemijn has been paid more than $50m in royalties from licensees, some of which had unsuccessfully challenged the validity of the patent, and licensees include IBM Corp, AT&T Corp, NCR Corpand Digital Equipment Corp; Cabletron’s licence with Willemijn was cancelled when Cabletron suspended royalty payments in 1993, court papers say. – o – Raising one or two eyebrows, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA has appointed Bernhard Auer commercial and marketing director of its personal computer division after Soren Bansholt moved another post in the group: Auer resigned as vice-president of the personal computer sector of Digital Equipment Corp in August (CI No 2,721); he will report directly to Olivetti managing director Corrado Passera, who will head the personal computer division when it becomes a separate company next year.
GTE Corp has joined with Nissan Motor Co and Japan Telecom Co in a new company TU-KA Shikoku Co to provide digital cellular phone service in Japan’s Tokushima, Kagawa, Ehime and Kochi prefectures of the Shikoku area: GTE said the new company, of which it will own 4.5%, will begin operating a 1.5GHz digital cellular system by June 1997. – o – Omaha, Nebraska-based MFS Communications Co Inc applied to the Delaware Public Service Commission for permission to offer local telephone services, on a co-carrier basis which means that MFS would get the same rights as the incumbent local exchange carrier Bell Atlantic of Delaware Inc: MFS has just won the rights to provide the services in Pennsylvania and with this application, has either has obtained co-carrier status or has applications or legislative initiatives pending in every state in the Boston-Washington corridor – known as BosWash. – o – Indonesia’s state-run telecommunications operator PT Telkom has awarded a $20m turnkey contract to a subsidiary of France’s Alcatel Alsthom SA and to Japan’s Marubeni Corp to build a 935-mile digital microwave transmission network on the island of Sumatra: the company said the deal, the first to use Synchronous Digital Hierarchy technology in Indonesia, will be financed by the Asian Development Bank. – o – Toronto, Canada-based Platform Computing Corp says it will be shipping version 2.2 of its Load Sharing Facility software for sharing workloads across network resources in the first quarter of next year: version 2.2 includes load distribution across wide area networks.
