Zenox Communications Corp of Toronto, Canada has developed a multimedia server that it says is the first designed to handle several outbound and inbound speech, facsimile, data messaging applications at once. Dubbed the Communication Map, it allocates users with a 10-digit phone number that serves as both a telephone and facsimile number, and an Internet address for electronic mail. The server uses the Internet for all messaging that is non-real time so that users incur only a standard cost per month, thereby making it a cheaper form of communication than an ISDN line, for example. The server users an ISDN line to transmit speech, 64Kbps data and 14,400bps facsimile messages, twice the speed of current fax transmissions. The server uses an Intel Corp 80486 as the main processor and a 90MHz Pentium for the OCR, optical character recognition, portion of the server. The OCR capability enables faxes to be translated into ASCII files. Proprietary dynamic port allocation algorithms enable the server to handle several types of either in-bound or out-bound through one port. No prices or availabity are currently given.
