In addition to Japan’s unreformed telecommunications environment, still dominated by Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp and Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co crimping the country’s equipment makers to become truly competitive (CI No 2,853) the country’s sky-high international call rates are also damaging Tokyo’s bid to remain the pre-eminent regional capital for inward investors, to the great benefit particularly of Singapore.
Intel Corp senior vice-president Dave House said its lawyers forced it to drop the name P7 in favour of Merced for Pentium Pro’s successor.
Retailing giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc plans to begin selling products over the Internet next month in a pilot test of electronic retailing software developed by Microsoft Corp: Wal- Mart will initially sell products that are not available in its 2,000-plus Wal-Mart and Sam’s stores; ultimately the company may offer over the Internet its entire inventory of 200,000 products, it said; Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said Wal-Mart is a pilot customer for the electronic retailing products, which include an add-on for Windows NT to be released later this year; the companies said they are working together to create a three- dimensional virtual store; Gates said Microsoft had no plans to collect a transaction fee on every purchase made using Microsoft software, although he acknowledged that it would be nice; he also said Microsoft itself would not be in any form of retailing, including electronic retailing; Microsoft plans to make a shopper utility for consumers to track purchases as a standard part of Windows; it will release its Merchant Server product by the end of the year, it said.
France Telecom says it will cut the price of phone calls and increase subscription rates to rebalance the price structure between the two and cut tariffs by an average of 5.5% this year: national long-distance rates will be cut by over 10% with rates to French territories overseas to be reduced by about 12% and international rates will be cut by an average 8.9%; monthly line rental for domestic users will rise 15.4% to the equivalent of $10.50, which it claims will still be one of the lowest rates in Europe – a bit like saying Sweden is among the hottest countries in Scandinavia.
CompuServe Inc is phasing out communications access surcharges, previously levied when subscribers use third party access points, for access to CompuServe from over 300 cities in Europe: in addition, all nodes will be upgraded to support 28.8Kbps, and some to support ISDN.
Sharp Corp, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, Nifty Co and the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper have joined forces to deliver news stories to Sharp’s Zaurus Personal Digital Assistant from March 1: Mainichi will provide about 150 to 200 stories each day, which will be temporarily stored in Nifty’s computers before being sent on to the Zaurus electronic notebook via Nippon Telegraph telephone lines; the service will be updated twice a day, and will be available to subscribers to the Zaurus on-line computer service for about $5 a month; Nifty is a joint venture between Nissho Iwai Corp and Fujitsu Ltd.
Integrated Computer Solutions Inc, the people that brought the industry the Xhibition X Window System show back in the old days, are putting together IntraNET NY, the first technical conference for Java applet developers: it’s to be held at the Manhattan Conference Center of the Millennium Hotel in New York April 8 to 10 and includes a small exhibition space; the show is going to Fun City because Wall Street is expected to be the first to capitalise on Java’s ability to develop intranets; http://www.ics.com/IntraNet/ or IntraN@ics.com for more.
Cabletron Systems Inc has launched a new European strategic partner programme, Synergy-Plus: the company aims to strengthen relationships with strategic value-added resellers, integrators and national telecommunications companies while hanging on to its direct relationship with multinationals companies.
NCR Corp, of Dayton, Ohio is scheduled to
demonstrate an 11Tb Teradata database in Japan this month.
British Telecommunications Plc has tapped International Telecom Japan Ltd as its local partner and the two will begin providing the Concert service in Japan in July: Concert, the one-stop international service launched by British Telecom and MCI Communications Corp in 1994, is already available in Australia and a further five Asia-Pacific countries are in the plan for coverage in the next 12 months.
Oracle Corp is claiming the best price-performance, best performance on iAPX-86-based systems, best performance on a quad processor and best performance on a system under $1m in total cost for the 3,849 tpmC – $161 per tpmC – recorded by Oracle7 7.3 running on a four-way Compaq Computer Corp ProLiant 4500 5/166 running under UnixWare 2.0.
There seemed to be a lot of nothing at the show this year – perhaps it was the location: Intel Corp director of Enterprise Programmes Mike Pope gave the first public presentation on the Merced successor to Pentium Pro at UniForum, adding nothing to what’s already been said.
It’s galling for the New York Stock Exchange, America’s premier exchange, that so many of the hottest high-tech companies such as Intel Corp are content simply to remain listed on the junior Nasdaq market rather than graduating to the Big Board as Compaq Computer Corp did a few years back and Bay Networks Inc is in process of doing: since there are only 26 of the things, the single letter stock symbol is vested with some cachet, and M is currently unassigned, and the Exchange is not talking, but the Wall Street Journal reckons it is being held as an inducement to persuade Microsoft Corp to move up to the Big Board.
