Belgium is a country of two halves, each almost completely autonomous, so the government can only wring its hands at the plans of Flanders to build its own rival phone system using Telenet Vlaanderen as its vehicle: the news that US West Inc is taking a stake in the venture caused Communications Minister Elio Di Rupo yo wail that Belgium needs a single information superhighway to preserve the future of state telephone operator Belgacom NV – but apart from its vast army of underemployed staff, few Belgians would shed any tears for the unresponsive monopoly with its costly and antiquated telephone system.
Intel Corp has today introduced the 120MHz Pentium in 0.35 micron technology, saying it makes functions such as Native Signal Processing meaningful is a 3.3V part and delivers 140 Specint92 and 103 Specfp92 performance; pin-compatible with 75MHz, 90MHz and 100MHz Pentiums, it has a 60MHz bus speed, and is upgradable to future Overdrive processors and is supported by the Triton chip set; the 0.35 micron technology means a 50% reduction in die area compared to Intel’s 0.6 micron technology and the part is being made in volume at the company’s fabrication plant in Oregon and other existing plants will be converted to make the chip as well; it is priced at $935 for 1,000-up.
Teleselect BV, a privately-held company gearing up to offer interactive services such as home shopping over cable television in the Netherlands, says it plans to enter other European countries in the first half of next year: Teleselect is 45% owned by Philips Electronics NV, 35% by Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV and 20% by US pay-per-view company Graaf Inc, and says it is in discussions in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden.
AT&T Corp’s Global Information Solutions values that major technology transfer on its 3600 series systems to South Korea at $1,000m over five years, and is worth $50m this year.
Northern Telecom Ltd signed a letter of intent that would make it the primary supplier for the video transport backbone serving Pacific Bell Inc’s hybrid fibre-coax network; terms weren’t disclosed, but its Synchronous Optical Network Cornerstone SuperTrunk application will be used as the backbone for the Pacific Telesis Group Inc net.
The London-based outpost of Bankers Trust, which last year expanded its disaster recovery positions to 180 places based at four London sites servicing its own business and other banks, is considering opening a site in Frankfurt, with up to 60 places: it’s been talking to German banks and businesses since the end of last year, and says it will go ahead, if there’s enough interest.
Mountain Lakes, New Jersey-based Computer Horizons Corp has discovered India in a big way, and is forming a software development and services joint venture with textiles conglomerate Birla Group Pte Ltd: the new equally-owned Birla Horizons International Ltd will offer to provide US companies a source of software development, especially such labour-intensive and repetitive operations as coding, testing, maintenance, help-desk activities and program design, and will be built on Birla Group’s existing Birla Information Technology unit in New Delhi, which has performed offshore project work for United States, Asian and African companies; Birla Horizons’ India offices will be responsible mainly for software development and maintenance, while its US offices will work on site at corporations to ensure implementation, user acceptance, documentation and training.
AT&T Corp is still trying to drum up interest in its plan to lay a $1,900m fibre optic cable around Africa and is seeking US government backing for the project: the 21,000-mile cable would have landing points in 41 African countries, plus Italy and Saudi Arabia, and be aimed at revolutionising business telecommunications on the continent; William Carter, president of AT&T Submarine Systems, told Reuters he received a good response when he presented the idea in Washington to Congressional subcommittees on Africa and trade
this month, but he acknowledged that getting the financing in place would be the plan’s biggest hurdle – even though Africa One was developed by AT&T in response to a request in October 1993 from the International Telecommunications Union to close the communications gap between Africa and the rest of the world – at the the moment AT&T is working on the project alone, but would welcome other participants.
Network Systems Corp, now owned by Storage Technology Corp, is to form a Japanese unit next month to boost sales of its routers: it currently sells through a Sumitomo Corp unit, and aims to double annual sales to $22m in the first year; Network Systems Japan, capitalised at $1.1m, will be held 85% by the US firm, 15% by Sumitomo Electronics.
Richardson, Texas-based Micrografx Inc has seen off one of those scabrous class action lawsuits, which has been hanging over the company since August 1991: in its order dismissing the suit with prejudice, the court held that the plaintiffs had failed to state a claim of securities fraud for which relief could be granted, but they are still free to appeal the decision.
Northern Telecom Ltd reports that the Omnes joint venture of Cable & Wireless Plc and Schlumberger Ltd will evaluate the Canadian’s Magellan switching systems to upgrade the capabilities of its global data and voice network, and for starters has bought two Magellan Passport enterprise network switches plus associated DPN-100 equipment and Magellan access switches; the mission of Omnes is to provide data and private voice services to energy industry companies operating in second- and third-world countries and if all goes well, 15 Magellan Passports will go in by year-end.
Chicago-based R R Donnelley & Sons Co is nearing final agreement on a merger of its Global Software Services business unit with Corporate Software Inc to create a company with combined annual revenues of more than $1,300m, majority owned by Donnelley and combining Donnelley’s $650m global software duplicating and fulfillment business with Corporate Software’s $650m distribution and support network.
Rochester, New York-based Frontier Corp – Rochester Telephone Corp as was – has completed the acquisition of American Sharecom Inc, privately-held Minneapolis long distance operator: it paid 8.7m new Frontier shares for American Sharecom, which has annual revenues of about $125m.
Recognition International Inc, Dallas reports orders for six of its new high-speed document transports from the ComputerGesellschaft Konstanz subsidiary of Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, which will resell it to customers in Germany: the Trace 2000 document transport provides high-quality image capture and optical character recognition at speeds of up to 2,400 documents per minute and also handles intermixed sizes and weights of paper.
Santiago-based long-distance operator Entel-Chile SA has received the go-ahead to expand and operate in the local telephone market: Entel plans eventually to set up its own domestic network, but in the short term it may rent services from other phone companies, Telecommunications Undersecretary Jorge Rosenblut announced; the company has said it will invest $30m this year to provide local telephone services, concentrated in the Santiago area.
Andersen Consulting is to sell its Dallas-based mainframe facilities management centre in Dallas to the GE Capital arm of General Electric Co Inc as part of an alliance with GE Capital under which Anderson will help companies manage and continuously improve their entire computing function while GE Capital will provide efficient, cost-effective mainframe services; GE Capital will also supply mainframe operations to existing Andersen Consulting clients using the Dallas centre.
The suit brought by Interdigital Communications Corp over digital cellular telephone patents went to the jury on Friday: Interdigital is seeking a whopping 5% of the gross value of sales of digital wireless phones, up to $25 per phone, and 3.5% of
gross base station sales.
Adobe Systems Inc’s $0.54 a share first quarter profit (see page five), came out $0.16 to $0.17 above consensus estimates, an achievement Adobe’s officers attributed to smooth absorption of former Aldus Corp, acquired last autumn: the company also said sales of applications grew 23% in the first quarter, to $122.3m, with a more than doubling of Acrobat revenues over the previous quarter at $3.5m.
Sprint Corp signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s second telecommunications carrier to help develop a national communications network: the partner is China United Telecommunications Corp, a state-owned consortium of several of China’s government ministries.
Hewlett-Packard Co made a big noise four or five years ago when it said it was to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange: on Friday it said its shares would be delisted from today because of the historic low volumes traded in its stock.
MCI Communications Corp told Reuters that Thursday’s deal with the US Public Broadcasting Service was only the first of a series of multimedia ventures that will squeeze more value out of MCI’s networks and computers and that there may be more as soon as this week: I would expect to see a steady stream of announcements starting as soon as next week, said Tim Price, group president of MCI Communications Services – You will see us teaming with content providers, and I put broadcasters in that category… and computer and business software, Price told the news agency.
BellSouth Corp, Pacific Bell Inc, American Personal Communications Inc, GO Communications Inc and Microcell -2-1 Ltd of Canada have all decided to go with the European Groupe Speciale digital cellular system for their Personal Communications Services networks, using the DCS 1900 variant of the DCS 1800 system used in the UK and Germany and adopted for use in 60 other countries; the alliance between Nynex Corp, Bell Atlantic Corp, US West Inc and AirTouch Communications Inc has not yet decided which system it will choose.
Lotus Development Corp has decided to take its copyright infringement case against Borland International Inc all the way to the US Supreme Court following the overturning of the ruling in its favour on appeal.
Peter Caserta, former president and chief executive of Spectrum Information Technologies Inc was indicted Thursday along with nine others on charges of mail and wire fraud: the indictment alleged that when Caserta was president and chief executive of the Caserta Group, the company held itself out as providing investment banking services to assist in the raising of equity financing for emerging and high technology companies and that By this scheme, these defendants exploited small and medium size companies struggling to survive in a difficult economy; the indictment says that among the falsehoods used to defraud victims were that the Caserta Group had $100m available to invest in small emerging growth companies; that the victim company’s prospects for financinag depended on an evaluation by the Caserta Group’s board; and that various other companies referred to as references had previously received funding through the Group.
Forgivable mistake, but embarrassing nonetheless: in its first notification of Cray Computer Corp’s bankruptcy filing, our favourite news wire correctly tagged the item Colorado Springs, Colorado, but then said Cray Computer Corp, the nation’s leading supercomputers company, said Friday it filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors and described it as Minneapolis-based – mercifully not true.
Microsoft Corp is thought to have agreed to pay around $9m to take a humble 1% shareholding in the new movie studio DreamWorks SKG; Microsoft’s co-founder, Paul Allen, is putting up $500m for 18.5% to become the biggest outside investor.
NEC Corp said it has applied for government permission to open an office in the Philippines to build a 115,000 land line and transmission network in Pangasinan
province.
Wait for them to turn up in the global sales figures! 3M Co Inc is running a massive promotion in the UK in which it is giving away 1m prizes to people who get one of the lucky stickers with their purchase of 3M products – 20 boxes of floppies generated two prizes here – but 200,000 of the 1m prizes are copies of IBM Corp’s OS/2 Warp, which is regarded as worth so little that it is exceeded only by the 250,000 Post It Note wallets, 250,000 Executive Rollerball pens and 273,730 neon Post-It Notes – but then IBM did say it had set aside $500m for promoting OS/2…
