Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp said it is discussing the possibility of a business tie-up with IBM Corp’s Lotus Development Corp but is not saying what it is about, although a similar deal to the one with AT&T Corp on Notes seems likely: the Nippon Keizai Shimbun reckons the two will offer corporate clients data services through ordinary telephone lines from 1996. – o – MCI Communications Corp has decided not to float off a minority in any of its units, and has instead decided to give separate financial reports for its regulated and unregulated businesses from this year. – o – Motorola Inc’s Cellular Infrastructure Group has signed two contracts worth over $268m to supply wireless infrastructure equipment to China awarded by the Hangzhou Communications Equipment Factory of Ministry of Posts & Telecommunications, and Zhejiang Technical Import & Export Corp, a trading company that facilitates all high technology import and export agreements for companies and factories in Zhejiang province: the contracts expand on an existing agreement with Hangzhou to manufacture and distribute Motorola’s digital cellular and Total Access Communications Systems cellular infrastructure equipment; the company will also provide Hangzhou, its only cellular infrastructure manufacturing licensee in China with support services. – o – New York-based multimedia publisher Enteractive Inc has signed a letter of intent to acquire privately held software developer Lyriq International Corp for between $4m to $5m in stock, and the company said it expects the transaction to close in the first quarter of 1996: Enteractive, which has about 4.8m shares outstanding, will issue 1m to 1.2m common shares for Lyriq, whose shareholders will end up with a 20% stake in the enlarged firm. – o – The last time that a hardware vendor – Sun Microsystems Inc – got involved in Unix development, it led to unconscionable schism and the creation of the Open Software Foundation (for those with short memories, AT&T Corp moved to give Sun a privileged position in the development of Unix, taking a stake in the company to seal a deal that in the event very soon fell apart, more in apathy than acrimony): no-one’s suggesting that anything similar will happen this time arou nd, even with Hewlett-Packard Co apparently gaining a similar privileged prosition over Unix’s 64-bit iAPX-86 future, because as everyone involved is keen to point out, X/Open Co Ltd holds the ring, the Unix trademark, the Unix specification and the conformance test suites. – o – It’s always assumed that when commentators criticise a new product name, they do it just to be contrary, but ’tain’t so, and many new names are accepted without comment: Intel Corp, however will have to wait a while for the badmouthing of Pentium Pro for the P6 to die down, and the company is likely to come to regret the name, because it disguises the fact that the P6 is genuinely new, and more different from the Pentium than the Pentium was from the 80486; the problem is that journalists and other commentators tend to pay much less attention to the 93rd iteration of a part like the Pentium than they did to the first and second, and many will tend to regard the Pentium Pro as simply a very late-in-life Pentium. – o – NEC Corp is establishing a $45m assembly joint venture for transistors and low-level integrated circuits in Indonesia: partners in the new PT Humpuss Semiconductors Indonesia are PT Humpuss Electronika and Japanese trading house Sumitomo Corp; construction of the plant will begin in January with assembly, at a rate of 15m linear integrated circuits and 100m transistors a month, is due to start in 1997; NEC will provide 65% of the start-up capital of $15.4m, while Humpuss Electronika will provide 25% and Sumitomo Corp the balance. – o – Apple Japan Inc has launched a programme to spur sales of computers and services in Japan’s desktop publishing market by authorising about 500 retail outlets to provide diversified customer support: the Apple Publishing Partner programme is in line with Apple’s new strategy to focus on speci
fic market segments rather than trying to sell generic personal computers, Apple Japan president John Floisand said; Apple also announced a new PowerPC model, Macintosh 9515/132, aimed at Japan’s publishing market, where Apple holds a strong presence over other personal computer manufacturers; the company also said sales of personal computers for the year ended September 30 rose 25% from last year to around 700,000 units. – o – Tokyo-based Victor Co of Japan Ltd said it will introduce 15 3.5 magneto-optical disk platters for personal computers, offering higher durability than those now in use: the company said its disk-coating technology will enable users to rewrite data on the new disks more than 10m times; storage capacity of the disks ranges from 128Mb to 230Mb; each disk is contained in a cartridge and weighs about 1.4 oz; Victor, 51%-owned by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co Ltd, will start selling the disks next week. – o – We understand that all of Novell Inc’s existing UnixWare OEM contracts will be inherited by Santa Cruz Operation Inc just as they stand, at least for the time being. – o – As names for sporting venues go, Candlestick Park is a pretty neat one, so we’re at one with the San Francisco locals aghast at being expected to think of the stadium as 3Com Park, however much sponsorship 3Com Corp put up for the privilege – $500,000 for this season, another $3.5m for the rest of the century and San Francisco needs the money to prepare for the 1999 SuperBowl – but someone, somewhere always has it worse, and down in Shreveport, Louisiana these last six years, they have been trying to get used to thinking of the Independence Bowl as the Poulan/Weed Eater Bowl.
