Nissan Motor Co Ltd is to link up with Sega Enterprises Ltd to supply information on the Internet, with its 3,000 sales outlets in Japan installing Saturn games machines in the first phase, to provide information about its new cars; in the second phase, Nissan and Sega will develop a device to connect the Sega machines with the Internet: and aim to begin marketing the new device for about $200 through Sega’s sales network, starting in the spring of 1996, the automaker said.
Second-quarter personal computer application sales in Western Europe were up only 1% over the same period last year, to $423m, said the Paris-based Software Publishers’ Association Europe: even for the first half, sales were up only 3%, although unit shipments, were up 48% in the quarter and 44% for the first half; the strongest region was Germany, which posted a 79% increase in unit sales in the first half; sales of Windows for the second quarter were up 6% over the second quarter last year, to $388m, while MS-DOS and Mac application sales declined 35% and 28% to $20m and $13.5m, respectively; the Association estimates that Windows applications now make up 91% of reported US application sales in Europe.
Stream, the consortium of Stet SpA, 75% and Telecom Italia SpA, 25%, intends ultimately to offer subscribers in Rome and Milan a open decoder that will be able to receive either satellite transmissions or packets sent over cable, says Il Sole-24 Ore: the company has already launched its VideoMagic service to some 1,000 clients; a recent film costs them about $3, while shopping and services are free; subscribers will pay no monthly fee until the service becomes commercial probably next fall; even then, says the paper, interactivity will be limited due to limitations in Telecom Italia’s exchanges; chief executive Miro Allione says Stream has already invested some $40m; its partners include IBM Corp, thanks to its agreement with Stet for multimedia systems, and Bell Atlantic Corp, Allione said.
Lou Gerstner will be lifting the fog right off San Francisco Bay to present the keynote chief executive address to Uniforum 96 at the Moscone Center which runs from February 12 to 16: given that he’s slated to speak on St Valentine’s Day, we’re confident IBM Corp’s chairman, chief executive and golden boy will need no reminder to leave his heart in San Francisco; joining Gerstner are other keynoters Lewis Platt, chairman, president and chief executive of Hewlett-Packard Co, and Jim Clark, chairman of Netscape Communications Corp.
France Telecom announced in its bulletin Thursday that, as of October 3, it will cut its ISDN rates in major cities to equal telephone tariffs, so that depending on the zone and the distance, ISDN, or Numeris, as it is known in France, will fall in prices by between 17% and 73%: a peak-hour communication over 60 miles in distance, for instance, will drop to $0.37 per minute from $0.50 per minute; the operator said that rules for telephone rates for peak and off-hours will ever after also apply to ISDN.
Elonex Plc is promising to offer jobs to any of the 50 personal computer assembly people it laid off at its assembly of personal computers at its Cumbernauld, Strathclyde plant when production of personal computers at the plant is planned to resume in November; some 150 people are also employed making surface-mount circuit boards at the plant; cessation of computer production was actually at the end of July but the company only made it public knowledge earlier this month, and is not giving details of what has actually gone wrong, but it says it has taken advantage of the seasonal lull in sales this summer to make some radical changes and once these are complete, it will start to rehire; personal computer assembly was transferred to Cumbernauld in summer last year from the company’s London facility; problems arose in April, forcing assembly to be moved back to London, which had been kept active to produce large contract orders.
Pacific Internet Inc, Culver City, California is ad
ding Linux-based Caldera Network Desktop to its Web-in-a-Box Internet server software.
The Open Software Foundation, Cambridge, Massachusetts named Hewlett-Packard Co’s Jim Bell interim president and chief executive, succeeding David Tory: he is on a six-month sabbatical from his post as director, Open Systems Alliances.
Fiat SpA has chosen Telecom Italia SpA over AT&T Corp and British Telecommunications Plc for a facilities management contract of its telephony worldwide: under the contract, Telecom, which already manages Fiat’s speech traffic between all its Italian offices, will handle everything from telephone maintenance to billing for Fiat’s 60 locations in 17 countries until at least 1999, while offering a discount of at least 30%; the choice was made in part based on past experience – Giorgio Garuzzo, chief executive of Fiat, says the automaker has derived enormous advantages in terms of service and cost reductions from its existing contract with Telecom – Now we expect the same results on an international level; Fiat expects its business to grow significantly abroad in the next few years, he added.
AT&T Corp clearly simply wants shot of the embarrassment of NCR Corp, the final earnest of its total disaffection being the rebaptism of a once-proud company with the ludicrous and demeaning Global Information Solutions name: according to PC Week, when the news that big job cuts would precede a spin-off of the company was released last week, employees gathered in an on-campus auditorium in Dayton were greeted not by chief executive Lars Nyberg but a 10-minute video starring Lars; insiders are suggesting that Nyberg may have been concerned about his personal safety…
