Sydney, Austalia-based BICC Plc subsidiary Metal Manufactures Ltd is planning up to five more cable manufacturing plants in the Asian region through joint ventures over the next five years, it told Reuters: the company, 61.6% owned by BICC, already has plants in Indonesia and Malaysia, and wants to expand in Asia through a 50-50 $52.5m joint venture with its parent called BICC Cables Asia-Pacific; a recent venture, BICC Berca Cables is on track to begin production in early 1997, initially producing cable for the power utility and construction markets but eventually supplying telephone networks the company said; the company is also looking at other Asian countries, and has considered importing Asian-made products back into Australia.
Dallas, Texas-based Voice Control Systems Inc has signed a development agreement to supply its speech recognition technology to an unnamed major cellular telephone manufacturer which, it said, plans to incorporate it into a car kit that will enable cellular telephone users to dial by speaking a name or phone number: because the technology is in the kit, users will be able to voice dial almost anywhere they travel unlike network-based systems that prevent voice dialling outside specific geographic areas; the agreement covers both speaker-independent and dependent systems.
The San Jose, California Western Geophysical Inc division of geophysical contractor Western Atlas International Inc has bought a Fujitsu Ltd VPP300 supercomputer system for its Houston data centre and says it will be the most powerful four-processor supercomputer ever installed in the worldwide oil industry: it provides 8.8 GFLOPS peak performance and 8Gb memory in four processors running Fujitsu’s UXP/V Unix operating system; the VPP300 supports a variety of peripheral subsystems, including high-performance disk and high-performance network connections to Western Geophysical centres around the world. – o – ADC Telecommunications Inc, Minneapolis, and the Nokia Telecommunications arm of Nokia Oy, Helsinki are getting into bed: the two announced at Networks 95 that they have definitive agreement for joint development of products for world cable television and telecommunications markets using ADC’s Homeworx hybrid fibre-coaxial broadband access and Nokia’s ACM2 speech and data multiplexers: the agreement includes the joint development of interfaces for ETSI standard countries and also reciprocal marketing arrangements between Nokia and ADC; the companies will also jointly develop next-generation broadband.
Funny, we thought the utility typically paid a peppercorn rent for the land on which the telephone pole stood, and owned the actual pole, leaving it free to allow the Young New Labourites or the local electricity company to stick posters on or attach cables to it or not as it saw fit, but Teleport Communications Group Inc is crying foul to the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, complaining that Bell Atlantic Corp is being a dog in the manger about its telephone poles, and won’t let Teleport attach its fibre cables to them; according to Dow Jones & Co, Bell Atlantic officials said they were not engaging in anti-competitive business practices, they were just ensuring that construction would be done safely and properly (but, sadly, not in an environmentally friendly manner – thousands of otherwise delightful American townships are scarred and disfigured by an unruly tangle of overhead cables that in most of Europe would be required to be decently buried.
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, Cable & Wireless Plc, Hong Kong Telecommunications Ltd and Itochu Corp are in final talks on a joint venture for the Personal HandyPhone System business, an Itochu spokesman said: the venture would concentrate on business in Asia; a Nippon Telegrapher said his firm does not have an agreement with other companies to establish a Hong Kong-based venture to promote the system yet.
Nynex Corp, Japanese trader Mitsui & Co and the Asian Infrastructure Fund are investing a total $250m in Excelcomin
do, an Indonesian digital cellular phone venture planning to start Groupe Speciale Mobile services in mid-1996 to reach most major cities by 1998: Nynex’s stake, the only one disclosed is 23%; the largest local stake goes to PT Telekomindo; individual holdings go to Santana Telekomindo, Yasayan Kartika Eka Paksi and Yasayan Tridaya.
The president of IBM Argentina SA told a judge that the company paid $21m to a firm at the centre of an alleged bribery scandal (CI No 2,754), the state-owned Telam news agency reported, but said that although the payment to sub-contractor CCR was inconsistent with company policy, an internal IBM investigation had not turned up evidence of any crime: he admitted there’d been a mistake but said no malicious intent could be proven; the company would continue its investigation; IBM Argentina’s previous president and two vice-presidents resigned in mid-September amid allegations that the firm had paid bribes to win a $249m government tender to computerise the Banco de la Nacion’s 252 branches and headquarters and Argentina asked Switzerland to freeze a bank account into which funds had been deposited by CCR, the economy minister said.
The legendary continuity girl, who was charged with making sure that Tom Mix was for example wearing the same pair of cowboy boots and the same coloured white hat when he was seen leaving the bar and when he emerged on the street, has at IBM Corp been replaced by a continuity boy, but the mission is very similar: it is to ensure that all IBMers speaking to a particular brief tell journalists the same story – but on last week’s RS/6000 and PowerPC press trip to the US, the various authoritative presenters conspired to make his task impossible, not least because matters such as what is to become of the Power Personal Systems division are in process of being decided, but even on trivial matters such as the PowerPC road-map, he failed to prevent speaker number one, who refused even to acknowledge the existence of a PowerPC 630 being followed by speaker number two showing a foil with the PowerPC 630 on it.
