Colonial Data Technologies Corp is in talks with foreign telecommunications equipment suppliers which may lead to a stake being taken in the firm, but it declined to identify the companies: however, in answer to a question from Reuters suggesting firms such as Sweden’s L M Ericsson Telefon AB or Finland’s Nokia Oy as possible partners, it agreed that they were typical of the firms with the right global scale and experience; the company, a maker of telephone equipment that displays the subscriber name and number of incoming calls, wants partners to open up emerging Caller ID markets in Europe, Japan and Latin America; earlier this month the firm was rumoured to be a takeover candidate as part of a strategic deal; it confirmed talks, but denied any takeover was pending.
Toshiba Corp said it is proposing to consumer and professional electronics companies that hold licences for Digital Video Disk players that they should jointly set up a company to manage royalty contracts and revenues: a number of companies hold licences to technologies included in the Digital Video Disk standard, and Toshiba said a joint company would enable smooth growth in the market; it is waiting for answers to its proposal from the companies concerned and details of the new company have not yet been decided; for commercialisation of Digital Video Disk-based products is planned for around autumn 1996.
Don Cruickshank, UK director general of telecommunications, has approved a series of new, lower international accounting rates proposed by British Telecommunications Plc for use in settling with US telephone operators for calls between the two countries: the new rates will involve reductions across a range of services, including international direct dialled calls.
Louisville, Colorado-based Storage Technology Corp announced that it has shipped its 1,000th Iceberg 9200 Virtual Storage Facility, a 180Gb disk system: it went to Allied Signal Inc in Phoenix, Arizona.
Hong Kong paging operator ABC Communications (Holdings) Ltd will provide Internet services through the launch of ABC Net, which offers service such as PageMail and electronic mail paging and will link Hong Kong subscribers to Internet: the ABC services will be offered at prices ranging from $12.70 to $48.50 per month with hourly access rates ranging from $0.60 to $1.70; the company said that it did not expect the service to provide major revenue, but viewed it as a significant part of its business because of its enormous potential.
To cut immigration queues, the world’s travel agents have come up with credit card-sized digital passports, which store a holographic image of the bearer’s hand along a magnetic strip, and should enable people to clear customs in a fraction of the time it currently takes: by sliding cards into scanners similar to bank cash dispensers, travellers would skip the lengthy immigration queues that plague most international airports, ports and road crossings, and obviate the need for officials to check visas and photographs manually the World Travel & Tourism Council said; experiments have already been done in the US with 50,000 travellers and international experiments are in preparation in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK using common card and machine standards; digital passports, which may also store eye and voice scans, could also help halt international terrorism by making it virtually impossible to forge travel documents; Japanese holidaymakers and business people who travel regularly to Hawaii could begin using digital immigration procedures, dubbed FAST for Future Automated Screening for Travellers, in as little as three months, when Hawai hopes to start its own trial.
Ronkonkoma, New York-based InSync Software Corp has integrated Englewood, New Jersey-based Momentum Software Corp’s X*IPC asynchronous messaging service into version 8.0 of its Passport three-tier application development system: InSync says it gives its customers the option of high-end asynchronous partitioning development alongside the remote procedure call and publish-and-subscribe methods Passport also supports; Passport is $8,000 with support for remote procedure call and messaging; middleware licensing is an additional $200 per client or server, and two-tier Passport (without the support) is $4,000, with no deployment fee.
Illustra Information Technologies Inc, based in Oakland, California, just across the bay from Frisco, has released version 3.2 of its Illustra Server object-relational database management system: enhancements include support for repeatable reads and a high-speed locking manager; in addition, read-only transactions have been optimised; Version 3.2 runs under SunOS, Solaris, Irix and Windows NT, and costs from $1,250 per concurrent user.
PostModern Computing Inc, Mountain View, California, has converted its ORBeline 2.0 object request broker to run under HP-UX, AIX and Digital Unix, and added interoperability with Object Linking & Embedding: ORBeline is already up under SunOS, Solaris, Santa Cruz Unix, Windows NT and Windows95; a Unix-based developer’s licence costs from $5,000, with run-time fees of $250.
They do still find time to go to the movies over at Unigram.X and say Honest, we’re not taking it as evidence that IBM Corp is ditching AIX – just because mainframes, Thinkpads, OS/2 Warp and AS/400 all get bit-parts in Goldeneye, the first James Bond caper with Pierce Brosnan, and AIX Unix doesn’t…
