One of the UK’s great British institutions, the British Broadcasting Corp, plans to digitise its news gathering and transmission operations and is tendering for suppliers: under European legislation the Beeb must issue the tender notice and then say nothing until the closing date of August 21, so details of the systems required remain sketchy; all we know is that the system must be capable of supporting the 5,000 concurrent users in 100 worldwide locations that use the existing system; a prime contractor is required to take charge of other suppliers and will be offered a five-year contract with the option of a 10-year renewal; the BBC said the reason behind the move was to expand the news-related information available to its users and to increase the accessibility to it, which will involve long term storage and access to all media involved in news production using retrieval and storage technology; Avid Technology Inc and Sony Corp are probably the two front-runners – but Avid could have the field to itself, because last night, Avid’s shares danced up $4.50 to $46.50 after Volpe Welty analyst Charles Finnie declared that Sony, which has been perceived as a threat by Avid investors, has pulled its Destiny product off the market; Sony could not be reached for comment.
Silicon Graphics Inc stormed through the $2,000m sales mark for its fiscal year just ended (figures, page seven): Forty-five percent top-line growth for a $2 billion company is hardly conservative, said analyst David Wu at S G Warburg & Co, noting that the results carried no surprises; We view this as a tremendous year, both the full year and the quarter, Tom Oswold, vice-president, finance at Silicon Graphics, told Reuters in an interview – I don’t think anybody (in the industry) is matching our 45% growth rate, and he now expects the company to raise its growth targets for both revenues and gross profit margins over fiscal 1996 – in October, it raised its revenue growth target from the 35% range into the low 40% range.
Texas Instruments Inc plans to raise output of logic and memory circuits at its Japanese plants to meet the increasing demand generated by the personal computer boom, investing its share of $588m to expand its KTI Semiconductor Co Ltd joint venture with Kobe Steel Ltd in Nishiwaki, central Japan, adding a production line with capacity of up to 20,000 8 wafers a month.
Ireland’s state-owned phone company, Telecom Eireann, is expected to get the go-ahead from the Irish government to sell up to 35% of itself this week, the Irish Times reported: British Telecommunications Plc and Cable & Wireless Plc are among parties that have indicated an interest in the company.
Shares in De La Rue Plc slumped 29 pence to 897p after it revealed that it expects only modest 1995-96 earnings growth: it blamed challenging trading conditions and other factors for the fact that it was still expecting to see only modest growth in its headline earnings per sh are for the current year.
IBM Corp plans to offer an integrated suite of anti-virus products and services: IBM AntiVirus is designed for home, small business and corporate users and will be widely available through reseller and retail outlets at $50 for one user; IBM claims that AntiVirus scans memory, hard disks, floppy drives and network servers for the thousands of viruses, including polymorphic viruses that change to avoid detection, and viruses previously considered impossible to detect, and runs under OS/2, MS-DOS and Windows, with support for Windows NT and Windows95 in fourth quarter.
Silicon Graphics Inc will open a training centre for technophobic animators wanting to learn how to use post-production software in London’s Soho Square: the centre, due to open in November, will provide training in graphics and special effects software such as Flint & Flame from Discreet Logic UK Ltd.
Despite the general feeling that Eidos Plc’s Software Videophone coder-decoder due out mid-August will slaughter sales of British Telecommunic
ations Plc’s videophone range, British Telecom remains unashamedly optimistic that its range will thrive: We’re happy to see other vendors enter this market, the company said, adding that its PC Videophone, which costs ú3,300 excluding the cost of the personal com puter and the ISDN line, would ship over 1,000 units this financial year and much more the year after as the price of hardware drops and ISDN become cheaper.
NEC Corp now plans to do 16M-bit synchronous dynamic random access chips, and looks to charge a 10% premium; samples are set for September, volume for fourth quarter.
Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc’s former president and vice-president of sales have been charged with securities fraud for their role in a scheme in which it is alleged they tried to inflate the revenues of Kurzweil and with making false statements to auditors, the US Attorney’s Office said: Bernard Bradstreet and Thomas Campbell were charged with conspiracy, securities fraud, and making false statements to auditors, and David Earl, former operations vice-president, was also charged with making false statements to auditors, the Office said.
National Australia Bank Ltd says it will be the first bank in Australia to begin trials of a stored value Smart Card: initially, it will issue its staff with 1,000 cards for use in its head office cafeteria and staff shop in Melbourne, starting on August 7, with extensive public tri als to start in November.
Unisys Corp reports a competitive contract by the US Internal Revenue Service to provide information support services to the Department of Treasury with a potential value of $200m; EMC Corp will also be supplying disk arrays under the deal.
Although it does not appear to have eradicated human error, Data Sciences UK Ltd, Farnborough, Hampshire says its Nemesis data fusion technology will prevent British troops from killing their allies in what is called ‘friendly fire’ incidences: the company has just completed a ú3.5m demonstration project of the technology to the UK Mi nistry of Defence; it combines sensor data and enables bombers to track and indentify aircraft, in real time, and assess their level of threat; Data Sciences was joined by GEC-Marconi Defence Systems and Thorn EMI Electronics in the contract.
Calgary, Alberta-based QSound Labs Inc reports that IBM Corp’s new Aptiva of home computers will include both QSound’s patented sound localisation and stereo to surround sound technology as standard features: the company’s multidimensional software algorithms run on the IBM Mwave signal processor.
Now Sanyo Electric Co Ltd opted for Qualcomm Inc’s Code Division Multiple Access cellular and wireless local loop technology, signing a royalty-bearing licence to make and market subscriber kit worldwide.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery they say, so we suppose that Victor Kiam will not be too distressed that according to US PC Week , Lou Gerstner is to appear in person in IBM Corp’s forthcoming Notes television commercials – and in one spot, it’s said he holds up a Notes box and says I liked Notes so much, I bought the company…
